Choosing a sustainable wedding: How sustainable is eloping?
Your daily mission is to protect mother nature and of course, your big day shouldn’t be an exception. So how can you celebrate your wedding guilt-free while making environmentally conscious decisions? We’ve got you covered! Let’s talk trash, wedding dresses, and most importantly, why we think eloping is the most sustainable way to get married!
Why does sustainability matter?
An average traditional wedding produces hundreds of kg of trash and so much more in CO2 emissions. Not cool! If you haven’t considered this yet, let us give you a few examples:
Paper invites will be sent around and thrown away.
People travel from all over the country (or around the world) to celebrate your wedding, sometimes by plane.
Leftover food will be thrown away.
Wedding dresses are often made of unsustainable materials and - even worse - worn once and end up in storage.
Diamonds and metals used for wedding rings are often sourced under harsh conditions in developing countries.
The list is much longer but what we are trying to get to: Your choices absolutely matter! For you right now and maybe you will inspire a friend to plan their wedding day in a similar way. This is one part of your small contribution for a better planet. How beautiful to combine this with one of the most exciting days of your life!
Why eloping?
Now the good news: Unconventional choices like eloping will make it easier to choose sustainable options. If to you, a traditional wedding sounds more stressful than fun, eloping might be perfect for you and your partner. Exchanging your vows is a very special moment for both parties and there is a chance that you don’t want to share your deepest thoughts and feelings with a big crowd. Eloping allows you to be more selective. Maybe you want to celebrate your wedding simply with your partner, maybe you want to bring an exclusive group of friends and family along on your journey. Either way, eloping allows you to celebrate your love in a way that feels true to yourself and to your relationship. Instead of spending a whole day with everyone else’s expectations, you can go on a big adventure, explore and feel one with nature. That’s where sustainability comes into play!
The sustainable approach
Sustainability has a well-discussed topic, especially over the last couple of years. But what does it mean to get married the sustainable way? Sustainability consists of 3 mains areas:
Environmental protection
Economic viability
Social Equity
On a personal level, it means making choices that protect the environment, using resources mindfully and in the least wasteful way possible, choosing practices and products that don’t cause harm in their production to the environment and other human beings, and being conscious of working conditions and working rights within the supply chain. In more concrete terms:
Reduce.
Recycle.
Reuse.
The elopement location
Once you decide to elope, you will put a lot of thought into your destination wedding, particularly where you want to go and what epic scenery you’d love to experience. There are multiple ways to make your big adventure more sustainable:
Make it a small party
Many couples choose to celebrate their elopement as a party of two (plus photographers) or in small groups of up to 20 people. This already reduces the number of people traveling from A to B - way more sustainable than a big white wedding!
Take the train or carpool
As you might know already, flying increases your CO2 footprint immensely and is often not even that much faster. Instead, make it part of your journey. Rent a campervan, take a little more time and go exploring while on the way to your final destination. Alternatively, you could also carpool with your guests and partner (maybe even us) and have a fun ride. Or take the train. Imagine getting to your wedding destination with the Trans-Siberian railroad! What an adventure! (Any normal train is very fun as well though.)
Leave no trace!
Mother nature is incredibly beautiful and therefore worth protecting. Your elopement day might be long and can contain multiple little or big adventures. You might want to bring a picnic, some snacks, and most importantly a bottle of champagne or two. It’s celebration time after all! Make sure to have everything ready to take your trash with you. Especially in remote places, there won’t be any trash cans available and you want to make sure that the next adventurer finds this place as serene and beautiful as you did!
Choose sustainable alternatives
Say no to plastic! It can be tempting to choose plastic cups or to wrap anything you’d like to bring in plastic. However, even if you take it home, plastic is one of the biggest sources of pollution on the planet. And while balloons are fun and romantic, they often end up somewhere in nature and can cause serious harm to the wildlife. At least 8 million tons of plastic end up in our oceans every year and we don’t need to encourage further production of it. Additionally, many other materials look much better in pictures (we said it…) and do their part to keep the environment clean and safe.
Sustainable wedding dresses
Real talk: A dress that you plan to only wear for one day in your life will never be fully sustainable. Even if you choose sustainable materials, the thought that a beautiful wedding dress will never see daylight after its big day is simply sad. Luckily, there are many ways to make your wedding dress more sustainable. If you really want to buy a new dress, aim for sustainable fabrics and try to shop locally instead of buying from a big company.
Use a preloved dress
Of course, not everyone has a hand-me-down family wedding dress available to them to take to a tailor and get fitted. If you do - amazing! A dress with a history already has wonderful memories woven in its fabric and this is your time to add your personal strand to it. If not, there are many wonderful secondhand options available, either online or in a physical shop. You can find some absolute gems and maybe no one else will have the same dress as you. Most tailors will make the necessary changes for cheap.
Resell your dress after the elopement
If you know already that you won’t wear your wedding dress after the big day, you can give it a second (or third) life and resell it afterward. You will make someone else happy and ensure the beautiful materials aren’t hidden away in a stuffy closet.
Upcycle your wedding dress
If you want to wear your wedding dress after your elopement, you can either choose something that can be dressed up or down easily (like a skirt-top-combo) or you can get your dress changed into something else once the festivities are over. Some wedding dresses can be turned into a cocktail dress or a skirt afterward. Get creative and when in doubt, get professional advice! There is probably a fun solution and you can make more wonderful memories in your wedding dress.
And of course: Don’t be too hard on yourself. Practice makes perfect and you won’t be able to make every single aspect of your elopement perfectly sustainable. You can always do your best - and have fun on the way!
