A wedding should be one of the happiest days of a couple’s lives. The event brings friends and family together in a celebration of love. Drinks flow, food is devoured and, hopefully, everyone goes home having had a great time.
In all the excitement, it’s easy to overlook the impact a wedding might have on the environment. Sustainability is being spoken about more now than ever. Luckily, if this is something you want to take into account on your wedding day, you can.
Let’s find out how, as we explore the perfect way to host a sustainable, zero-waste, ethical wedding. We’ll break down the damage a regular wedding has, before introducing alternatives for you to try.
Introduction to sustainable and ethical weddings
Do you know how much of an impact your big day could have on the world around you? Here are some startling statistics which might make you reconsider how you want your wedding to be.
Waste generated by the wedding industry
Everything we throw away which can’t be recycled has a negative impact on the environment. If something isn’t biodegradable, it could take thousands of years to break down naturally.
Plastic is unsurprisingly at the heart of the issue.
Individually, one wedding can produce as much as 20kg of plastic waste. What’s more, the black bags used to collect the rubbish are themselves potentially harmful. They can take as many as 90 years to break down under the ground.
But it’s not just plastic which has an impact. Food wastage is also a common theme for most weddings. A study from Sainsbury’s reveals the extent of this.
To put the wedding wastage into context, the average family home will throw away roughly £700($867.51) in food in one year. In other words, a few hours at one wedding can account for 65% of a home’s wastage across an entire year.
The carbon footprint of wedding celebrations
Rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere have directly led to warmer global temperatures, as warm air is trapped within the Earth’s atmosphere. As NASA highlight, this has directly led to shrinking ice sheets, warming oceans and a general rise in global temperature.
Sadly, UK weddings are again one of the chief offenders when it comes to CO2 contributions. As many as 14.5 tonnes of the gas will be created during an average celebration.
That’s a startling figure, given annual carbon emission per capita in the UK is just 9.1 tonnes. With roughly 250,000 weddings taking place every year, that’s a net result of 3,625,000 tonnes of gas being emitted.