What are eco-friendly weddings in Michigan?
A sustainable, eco-friendly wedding, is any green wedding with a decreased ecological impact on the planet. This can include choosing an eco-conscious wedding venue, hiring local Michigan wedding vendors that adhere to sustainable practices, selecting local foods, recycled wedding decor or a well loved vintage wedding attire.
25+ actionable items to plan an eco-friendly wedding in Michigan
Weddings generate an immense amount of waste. So, let’s start with some reality check stats. Based on Botanical Paperworks, an average wedding produces 400 lbs of garbage and 63 tons of CO2. If you take into consideration an estimated 2.3 million weddings in the US per year, that comes out to approximately 1 billion lbs of garbage and as many emissions as 4 people would produce in a year. In a single day.
All of the wedding waste is contributing to a number of much larger issues, overflowing landfills, ocean pollution and rising carbon emissions. If you care about our planet’s future, here are 25+ actionable items you can incorporate to a sustainable wedding in Michigan to reduce the environmental impact. To help you measure your carbon footprint of your event and start to think about what actions might have the greatest impact for you, try out a carbon Footprint calculator.
Sustainable wedding ceremony
Wedding destination in Michigan
The rising popularity of destination weddings leaves an increasingly higher carbon footprint behind, and the majority of it is being used on transportation. You can reducing plane travel and car emissions by booking a local all-inclusive venue in Michigan convenient for as many wedding guests as possible. If you do decide on a destination wedding location, keep it small and choose sustainable accommodations. This could be a tiny house in the Redwoods powered by solar, or a sustainable tree house in the Big Island of Hawaii.
Sustainable wedding venue
Choose a sustainable wedding venue that cares about the environment. But what exactly makes a venue eco-conscious? The most eco-friendly wedding venues in Michigan might be well insulated, use solar power, sustainable building materials and are committed to recycling and reusables. Look for an event venue that combines the most green initiatives. Another way to reduce your enfironmental impact is to consider a dual-site. These types of wedding venues can accommodate for both the ceremony and reception, rather than booking two separate locations for your wedding day. This approach cuts down on carbon emissions from guest and vendor transportation. Outdoor spaces in Michigan such as farms and gardens tend to be more eco-friendly, so hosting your ceremony and reception outside will cut down on electricity usage. Just imagine a gorgeous candle lit al fresco dinner under the stars.
Host a sustainable backyard wedding
If you host a green backyard wedding in your home, you are also gaining more power over your sustainable practices. Some venues have restrictions on bringing in vendors, so if you care about lowering your wedding day carbon footprint, this might be the right route. From the perspective of keeping everything eco-friendly, you can start with a budget plan to limit overspending on unnecessary things. Once you have a better idea of how your day will look, you can start thinking about setting up your home for a sustainable event, using local vendors, developing a garbage disposal plan and starting your energy/water conservation efforts. Check out this Michigan backyard wedding in the Upper Peninsula for some inspiration.
Always support eco-friendly vendors
Use local Michigan vendors for your hair and make-up, photography, videography, bar service, catering, cake, florist and anything else you might need. This will help keep your money in the local communities and reduce the carbon footprint of tens of vendors commuting to your wedding site from afar.
Green eco-friendly send-off
Instead of using sparklers for your exit, that often end up in a landfill after being used, consider dried lavender (amazing fragrance!), flower petals, birdseed, eucalyptus leaves, or bio-degradable confetti. These wedding exit alternatives are 100% natural and also make for beautiful photos.
Sustainable wedding reception
Use eco-friendly candles
Limit the amount of electricity you need at nighttime by lighting eco-friendly soy-based or beeswax candles by local candle makers. This option doubles as romantic decor and sets the right mood after sunset. Soy and beeswax candles are clean burning (emitting 95 percent less soot than paraffin candles) and often last longer. When burned, these candles release essential oils, which can add enchanting seasonal scents to the air.
Seasonal DIY flower bouquets
If you’re a creative, artsy couple and you’d like to sprinkle a bit of surprise into your day, you might want to venture out to a local grocery store and explore their flower selection. Featuring local seasonal blooms in your bouquet and floral decor is one great way to cut costs and participate in sustainable floral practices. One of my favorite local floral farms that cares about sustainable practices is We Adore Flowers.
Decorate with potted plants, succulents and cacti
If you opt for potted plants, they can live on for years! Potted plants, succulents and cacti will help decorate your space, invite cozy vibe and create a specific visual atmosphere. A gorgeous rainforest or a boho desert? You can really let your fantasy run wild with this one.
Rent sustainable wedding decor
Rather than buying all of your decor and furniture, use a rental for reusable items such as linens, furniture, and chandeliers. Buying second hand items is also a great way to repurpose and recycle unique, one of a kind, items. If you have to buy wedding decor, get things that you would love to use in your own home.
If you already own visually interesting furniture that you’d like to incorporate in your wedding, you can create a comfortable lounge area with carpets, poufs, leather camp chairs and colorful sofas. This approach will instantly personalize your wedding space. You can also use it for your portrait session.
Real Life Sustainable Wedding
Planning a guilt free eco-friendly wedding event
Elizabeth works as a corporate event and wedding planner, so she was well aware of the immense waste traditional weddings produce each year. For their wedding, the couple envisioned a guilt free eco-friendly event and came up with a comprehensive strategy to reduce their negative environmental impact. Elizabeth made sure the wedding party wore clothes they already owned and she purchased a wedding dress by Leanne Marshall, who is one of the best known sustainable wedding attire trailblazers.
Wedding invites and stationery were completely digital and the seating assignments were written on leaves foraged from the couples’ garden. Instead of wedding favors, the guests could choose from 2 local charities for the bride and groom to donate on their behalf. The bride hired a local organic flower farmer to provide the wedding florals from her sustainable garden and all the blooms on the tables were placed in environmentally friendly recycled glass jars, collected from friends and family to reduce wasteful purchases. The food was plated on eco-friendly palm leaf plates and plasticware from biodegradable material. The couple mostly eats a plant based diet, so they wanted their caterer to avoid beef and pork (these meats have one of the highest carbon footprint) and focus on organic and sustainably sourced ingredients across the whole menu.
Sustainable wedding attire
When the couple asked their bridal party to stand up with them on the wedding day, they made the request that they wear something they already own. The bride says, she couldn’t give them too much of a hard time knowing that she was going to be purchasing a new dress, though she wanted it to be as sustainable as possible. “I stumbled upon Leanne Marshall and after a bit of research, I was impressed with her sustainable practices and recycled dresses! I was lucky enough to catch a rare sample sale and snagged her perfect dress in a unique champagne color.” Elizabeth says. The dress already existed so she did not have the guilt of the waste from a custom wedding dress. Rob wore a dark grey suit that he already had in his closet. He purchased a new button up shirt, to fit the floral theme, and a navy tie to bring it all together.
Local wedding florals
The bride loves flowers that support native species of pollinators. Her mom got into a local butterfly conservation group a few years ago and now the whole family is involved! When selecting a florist, Elizabeth knew she wanted someone that would use the flowers she loves in her own garden. Lindsay Hufford, the owner of Peck and Petal Farm, is a local flower farmer whose vision for her purpose, met her own “spreading joy and connection in our local community through the beauty of locally grown, sustainable flowers”. As for the vases, she wanted the tables to look like a garden, so a collection of small vases made the most sense. Elizabeth was able to collect spice, baby food, mustard, and salad dressing jars, on their way to the recycling bin, from friends and family to use as tiny vases on her wedding tablescape. The secret recipe for removing the label glue: baking soda and olive oil!
Wedding Stationery
When it came to the invitations, Elizabeth’s experience as a corporate event planner has shown that electronic invitations make the most sense. She found a website, Appy Couple, that could manage the RSVPs, wedding website, and invitations. Planning a Covid-wedding meant multiple guest communications were necessary to keep everyone up to speed on the latest guidelines and expectations for the day. Starting with an email invite kept them expecting to see her in their email inbox instead of the mailbox.
Seating charts and other collateral
For the day of, Elizabeth wanted to keep the collateral to a minimum.The seating chart was one poster, affixed to a recycled cardboard box. The table numbers were made from extra thank you cards, why waste good cardstock!? For the guest favors, the couple knew early on that they wanted to make donations in the names of the guests in lieu of a physical favor. Elizabeth mentioned that it would have been much easier to print a card for everyone, which she thought many times during the creation process, instead they went completely eco! The bride’s fellow flower lover and good friend helped her collect leaves from her garden a few days before the wedding. They wrote each guest name on their own leaf in gold or silver sharpie, being sure to select the milkweed leaves for her fellow Monarch conservation friends! Elizabeth stored them in a container with damp towels to keep them fresh and green until the wedding. The bride’s parents used the existing decor items to make the leaf boards for the guests to find their names on and chose the charity they wanted to support: Humane Society of Huron Valley or Monarch Watch.
Wedding food
The next guest interaction was with the food, and they loved it. The chef is a close friend of the father of the groom and the in-house chef at the local headquarter for the food distributor US Foods. While Rob and Elizabeth eat mostly a plant based diet, many of their guests were looking for traditional proteins. They asked the to avoid beef and pork while focusing on organic and sustainably sourced ingredients across the whole menu. The chef created a unique and adaptable menu that was delicious while taking all the guests’ dietary restrictions into consideration.
To read more about this eco-friendly wedding, click here.
