Could you give up presents?

If you and your eco-aware significant other are a young couple just starting out in the world, you both are probably extremely excited about the day of opening your wedding presents. You’ll finally have one set of dishes and not 42 mismatched plates found at yard sales that sort of look the same. But if you’re both a little older with some money and clout (and your dishes already match) think about whether you really need all those presents you’re registering for. If you decide you can forego the gifts, just know that there’s a slew of charities out there that your wedding can help generate money for.

Having your guests get you gifts ups the eco footprint of your wedding and adds carbon and waste to the Earth. They’ll usually have to drive out of the way to purchase the gift, so there will be more carbon emissions. The gift will most likely be wrapped and you’ll end up throwing that away. Plus, there will be extra paper, cardboard, Styrofoam and plastic used in the packaging of the gift. Wedding gifts can end up generating a lot of waste. So, if you don’t really need a product, consider this alternative: ask your guests to make donations to an ecological charity in lieu of gifts.

Some charities have made this a very easy gift to give. The World Wildlife Fund has its own weddng Web site to help guests make contributions in your name.

You can also register with JustGive so that your guests can just log into the site, click on a link to donate to your chosen charity (pick an ecological one if you’re green wedding status needs a boost) and then leave you a message including how much they donated. JustGive also lets guests give to any of the 850,000 charities in your name, not just the ones you’ve chosen.

Here’s another idea to cut out gifts: Instead of giving out wedding favors, you can make a small donation in the name of each guest. The Knot reports that lots of couples have been trading little bags of chocolate labeled with their names and wedding dates for tiny pieces of paper reporting a charitable donation. Your wedding is a great excuse to give back to charitable organizations, and giving back is a perfect gift for you Earth-loving couples.

Greenpeace and the National Arbor Day Foundation are two other green charities that could use your wedding’s help to raise money. It’s easy for guests to donate to both charities in your name online. The National Arbor Day Foundation, which replants trees in national forests, also offers a way to swap regular wedding favors for brand new trees in your guests’ names. Each dollar plants one tree, so this can be an eco-friendly and wallet-friendly favor idea.

Planting trees instead of giving favors is a great way to cut down on consumption and waste, plus, it helps offset your carbon emissions. Figure out your wedding’s carbon footprint at TerraPass.org’s wedding calculator and find out how many new trees would be needed to neutralize these carbon emissions. Planting trees, instead of buying carbon offsets, is probably a more Earth-friendly way to offset carbon footprints.

Other charitable agencies with not-so-green ideas are also cashing in on the wedding gift trend. I’ll only include this one because it’s important to me and my dad, a 3-time cancer survivor: You can help fund world-class cancer research by having your guests give to UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Presents are a fun part of the wedding experience, but if you don’t really need them, and you want to save some carbon emissions and waste, opt for donations instead.