A green car to match your green wedding

www.bio-beetle.com

Transportation to and from your wedding is a large part of the event’s carbon footprint. Guests are driving or flying into town, driving from their hotels or homes to the ceremony, and sometimes even driving from the ceremony to the reception if the two events are being held at different venues.

For a wedding of 100 people, where about 35 guests are flying in and about 65 are driving, Terrapass.com estimates that about 40,000 lbs of CO2 would be emitted by transportation means.

What if you could cut that in half? Using biodiesel, an alternative fuel source made from vegetable oil, is one way to help reduce CO2 emissions.

The good news is that there are lots of car services that offer eco-friendly alternatives to gas guzzling limos or rental cars. Carolina Biodiesel and Clean Air Limo are two examples of this service. EcoLimo has services all over California. Bio-Beetle rents affordable and eco-friendly Volkswagen Beetles which are powered by 100 percent biodiesel fuel in Maui. Choose a green alternative, like a biodiesel car, over a 10-miles-to-the-gallon limo for your eco-friendly wedding.

Megan Hartman, the owner of Fourth Dimension Fuels, brings biodiesel to areas north of Tucson. She explained that biodiesel is thinner than regular gasoline and combusts more fully in diesel engines. This causes there to be less “junk” emitted, as more of the fuel is used as energy.
According to Hartman and Biodiesel.org, there are tons of benefits to using biodiesel.

Running 100 percent biodiesel eliminates:
48 percent of carbon monoxide emissions
47 percent of other particulate matter
67 percent of unburned hydrocarbons emissions

There are other benefits too.
Less emissions causes less of an effect on the ozone layer and better air quality
It takes less energy to produce and refine biodiesel
The fuel can be locally grown

Biodiesel is only available for diesel engines but there are other eco-friendly choices for transportation to and from your wedding. Encourage your guests to carpool to your wedding and rent hybrid or alternative fuel cars while they’re in town. Enterprise Rent-A-Car, National Car Rental and Alamo Rent A Car all have an optional carbon offset program that helps fund offset projects that remove CO2 from the environment.

Your wedding has big feet

-Set up invitation Web site? check.
-Limit the number of guests flying or driving into town? check.
-Make sure your wedding favors weren’t made with child slavery? check.
-Truck in special organic champagne? Let’s think about that one.

Even though organic champagne and sparkling wine is made without synthetic fungicides, herbicides or fertilizers, locally purchasing the bubbly stuff might actually be better for the environment. That’s because buying locally means you’re not trucking or flying in a product from who-knows-where. One of your main goals in planning a green wedding should be to keep the event's carbon footprint low, and reducing the number of miles travelled is a great way to do so.

But, if you’re near a good organic vineyard, you should definitely serve organic wine and/or sparkling wine at your reception. Diamond Organics is located in Moss Landing, Calif., about 100 miles south of San Francisco, so if you’re nearby, you could consider purchasing from them. My research has revealed that these organic items aren’t actually much more expensive than non-organic. Treehugger.com road-tested several different champagnes and sparkling wines.

The same deal goes for food. Many cities have wide selections of organic foods and you can just ask your caterer to use organic products or use an organic caterer. But, if you live in a small city, don’t truck in organic food just because it’s organic without comparing the environmental impacts of miles travelled vs. using inorganic food.

Wedding planner Candace Flores pointed out to me that having a green wedding is about trade-offs. You can spend less on organic food (and use regular inorganic products) if it means you’ll be able to rent out a venue that recycles. Think about the amount of cardboard, aluminum and glass that your wedding will produce and if it’s a lot, choose the recycling venue. But, if you’re doing a lot to minimize waste and having a smaller event, go with the organic food.

Of course, there are other ways to minimize your wedding’s carbon footprint besides serving organic food and recycling, like having a smaller wedding or using recycled paper. Some brides are buying carbon offsets from sites like Terrapass.org and Atmosfair to have a big wedding but still contribute to the environment. Before buying these offsets, which work by helping stop companies from polluting, check out this article by the New York Times about what you should know before buying.

A green proposal: Use recycled jewelry

a ring from greenKarat

Jewelry is a part of our culture that won’t soon be forgotten. The old routine of “put a ring on her finger” is a long-standing tradition prevalent in most of the world.

But many organizations have stopped to think about the environmental impact of jewelry.

Mining for precious metals is a leading cause of environmental pollution, according to Enviroblog. Gold, for example, comes with a whole slew of environmental and social problems.

No Dirty Gold, an organization trying to clean up gold-mining, lists the impacts of gold-mining.

It’s a major source of water pollution because miners let acid drainage, byproducts like mercury and other toxic chemicals seep into nearby water sources. Cyanide is one chemical leaked by gold mines that ends up killing populations of fish.

Dust from mines and smog from smelting plants is a considerable source of pollution from gold-mining.

Because of a process called heap leaching, almost all excavated material during gold-mining becomes solid waste. Cyanide is leaked through ore to separate gold from other materials for collection. The gold is processed to remove the chemicals but the rest is polluted and becomes waste.

These processes endanger natural areas and displace communities. In addition to polluting areas and creating unfit living conditions, gold-mining can change cultural traditions and is associated with alcoholism and prostitution.



GreenKarat is a company which promotes an eco-friendly jewelry movement by selling jewelry—including engagement rings—made from recycled and synthetic resources which cause less social and environmental harm.

Their site reports that there is enough pre-mined gold in the form of old jewelry to satisfy the gold demand for 50 years. In other words, we wouldn’t have to mine any more gold if we demanded the use of recycled gold.

Diamonds are another source of detriment to the environment, contributing to war (see this entry on blood diamonds) and energy and solid waste from mining practices.

There is truly sustainable jewelry out there.

www.greenkarat.com
www.brilliantearth.com
www.leberjeweler.com
www.miadonna.com
www.ringworksstudio.com
wiserjewelry.com

Recycling is a top way to end harmful mining techniques. Old precious metals can be re-processed and re-shaped into beautiful new modern pieces.

Using synthetic diamonds is another method. GreenKarat sells these “created” stones and they’re quite pretty (see picture above).

This eHow article lists other tips on how to buy eco-friendly jewelry, like shopping at vintage or antique stores for the perfect ring.

Earthworks is a watchdog organization that can tell you if miners are really using sustainable practices, so check with them before purchasing a ring.


a ring from Leber Jewelers

Eco-friendly jewelers are beginning to emerge. They point out to me the fact that our ways of life aren’t always sustainable. It’s becoming more and more clear that we can’t just keep consuming blindly: we must stop and think about how our traditions and our conditioned wants (like my own yearning for a big sparkly diamond) stack up to their environmental impacts.

An eco-aware venue

It might make you cringe to think about how much from an event bypasses recycle bins and gets thrown straight into the trash, only to cease function as just another piece of waste in a landfill. In order to prevent your wedding from becoming an everywhere-I-look-I-see-trash event, ask each venue you’re considering if they recycle.

The Stillwell House is a gorgeous estate in downtown Tucson which is rented for weddings and parties almost nightly. It’s a perfect venue, not just because it’s beautiful (picture a bride making her way down a wide winding staircase to a beautiful outdoor courtyard), but because the folks at the Stillwell House recycle religiously.

After chasing down her runaway pug Louie, owner and planner Candace Flores gave me a list of why the Stillwell House is eco-friendly when I went to visit her on Saturday:

· They recycled everything they can
· They use organic ingredients in their catered food
· They donate leftover food
· The venue is cleaned with environmentally friendly cleaning supplies
· Only real linens are used (no plastic tablecloths)
· The staff encourages couples to give guests edible or recyclable favors to minimize waste
· Plastic use is minimized as much as possible
· They serve food and drinks in glassware, which is reusable
· They use environmentally friendly light bulbs
· Low-water irrigation systems are used

“It’s just some small stuff we can do to help,” said Flores.

An employee who helps set up for events showed me the back of the house where cardboard and aluminum resources are stashed away for recycling.

“It stinks back here,” he said. “But hey, we recycle!” he said proudly.

Find a venue like the Stillwell House, which will put eco-friendly practices to use to make sure the waste generated by your wedding is handled with good intentions.