Wedded Bliss with a Low-carbon Twist
By Lindsay Coulter, David Suzuki Foundation staff member

If you’ve recently decided to tie the knot, you may have asked yourself some difficult questions, such as, “How do I celebrate such an all-consuming event without a lot of consuming – and polluting?” And “How can I feel good about this day, without feeling that I’ve simply added to the climate and other environmental impacts that will be felt by future generations?”

The solution, for me, was to have a low carbon wedding – a wedding with fewer net emissions. The first step involves reducing your greenhouse gas emissions, and in my case this fit well with my goal to make as small an environmental footprint as possible.

After doing much web research for information about sustainable, low-emission wedding ideas, it became clear that there were numerous ways to lower the emissions from our event – everything from organic flowers to choosing recycled gold wedding bands. All of these options for reductions are discussed in detail below. 

Air travel and greenhouse gas emissions

Like many couples, the biggest hurdle was the fact that we were asking 55 family members and friends to travel, by plane, hundreds – and in some cases thousands – of kilometres for our big day.

Air travel is by far one of the most environmentally detrimental things you can do. Burning jet fuel releases large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and the fact that this occurs mainly in the stratosphere causes other harmful climate impacts, like the formation of water vapour and other greenhouse gases. Having settled in Vancouver, but being from Edmonton and Victoria, this posed a challenge for us to have an environmentally-friendly wedding day. We opted to calculate the associated emissions of our guests’ travel and then looked for ways to mitigate, or ‘neutralize,’ their negative climate impact by purchasing carbon offsets.

Calculating air travel emissions

First choose a carbon calculator for flights. There are lots of free, online calculators that you can use (see the Resources section of our Go Carbon Neutral webpage for several options). Once you’ve selected a calculator, simply input the city your guest is flying from and the city they’re flying to, and the calculator will provide you with the estimated emissions. For example, a round trip flight from Edmonton to Vancouver works out to approximately 0.2 tonnes carbon dioxide equivalent, and Halifax to Vancouver is approximately 1 tonne carbon dioxide equivalent. Work your way through your guest list and don’t forget to include round-trips! At this point you will have a number in carbon dioxide tonnes. Our total was about 15 tonnes, or the equivalent of driving three cars for about a year.

Offsetting emissions

Next, offset those emissions (unless you can convince any of your guests to take the bus or ride the train, thereby reducing their emissions through their mode of travel). There are many online options for purchasing offsets. Each of these vendors is offering you reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from their projects. In essence you are paying someone else to make greenhouse gas reductions on your behalf. It’s important to choose high quality offsets to ensure that the money you are investing is creating new reductions that would not otherwise have happened. The reductions should also be permanent, like those from renewable energy and energy efficiency projects, and verified by third parties if possible.

We chose to invest in sustainable energy projects like wind power and solar power. We reasoned that it made sense to buy offsets that reduced the need for fossil fuels, given that our emissions were created by burning fossil fuels.

Making your wedding celebration low-carbon is really no different than budgeting for details like flowers or a wedding cake. You can choose to focus on one area of high impact, like air travel emissions, or you can try to calculate the emissions from the entire event. Like us, you’ll probably be surprised by how interested your guests are in your efforts, and how supportive they are.

Click here for tips for planning a green, low carbon wedding