The Carbon Cost of Your Wedding

There you are, happily planning your wedding, looking at gowns, registering for gifts, examining paper stock for invitations when it hits you — how harmful will your event be to our already stressed-out planet? More importantly, can you make your wedding eco-friendly without letting Mother Earth upstage you, the bride?

Armed with a little bit of knowledge about how many guests will be flying, driving and using hotels, you can easily calculate your event’s carbon footprint using a free online tool like TerraPass’s Wedding carbon footprint calculator. My advice is to take this calculator (and any others) with a grain of salt (use a grain of sea salt, if you want to be a purist about it).

For instance, the calculator will add up the energy usage of air conditioning, lighting and hot showers used by your guests at the hotel and add this to your footprint total. However, many of your guests would probably be using lighting and taking hot showers even if they were not attending your wedding. My point is, don’t feel über guilty about your wedding’s calculated eco-impact, even if you’ll be having 300 guests and the calculator returns an astronomical number.

You can be comforted that the wedding itself won’t be a big drain. Although the band/DJ, caterer and banquet hall will use energy, “truth be told, the amount of emissions from the event itself is small – about one ton of CO2 or less,” TerraPass says.

Once you know your carbon footprint, you can “offset it” by purchasing carbon credits from sites like TerraPass, Carbon Planet or Carbon Fund. This is a financial donation and so it obviously doesn’t reduce the actual emissions of your wedding. But it does help fund various validated projects such as hydroelectric plants, reforestation areas and the like. Such a donation can help you sleep better knowing that your happy day was good for Mother Earth, too.

You can read Julie Bort’s other blogs, too. She writes for Microsoft Subnet and Google Subnet and you can find Julie on Twitter.