Eco-Friendly Weddings

Eco-Friendly Wedding Coaching

Eco-Friendly Wedding Coaching is a consulting service aimed to help you identify aspects of your wedding that you'd like to ensure is sustainable and eco-minded, and to create a roapmap and solutions to help you get there.

Eco-Friendly Wedding Coaching includes:

One-on-one meeting or skype phonecall to brainstorm and envision green requirements for your perfect day
Advice and tips on cutting back your environmental and social footprint
Recommendations of eco-friendly and socially-minded suppliers and/or products
Assistance in contacting suppliers and sourcing quotes

I am happy to help you to the extent you wish - ie a little or a lot - so please get in touch with me.

Note: Eco-friendly Wedding Coaching is different to wedding planning, as such I do not coordinate the wedding or plan the details. However, if you do plan to have a wedding planner, I am happy to work with them to help 'green' your wedding.

Given my network of fair trade producers across the Philippines and access to designers, I can assist in having products hand-made for your special day, which in turn, helps to empower communities and uplift lives. Please contact me for more details.

Top 10 Eco-Friendly Wedding Tips

Use Fair Trade suppliers for your wedding elements - providing socially-responsible and environmentally-friendly options.
Where possible, consider the 3Rs - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Get creative - think of multiple uses for your wedding supplies, use recyclable materials.
Support your local industry - use local suppliers, local designers, local caterers, etc.
Reduce travel miles - choose a reception venue close to the ceremony site.
Instead of cut flowers, consider using herbs and potted plants - these can be given away as gifts to attendants and guests.
Consider offsetting your wedding by planting trees. As your life together grows, so will those trees, bearing witness to your love and creating new life in nature.
Wear a pre-loved wedding dress for the bride or suit for the groom.
Choose a caterer that uses organic and/or local produce.
Instead of favours, let guests know you donated to your favourite charity or environmental organisation.
Have a green honeymoon by travelling responsibly.

My Eco-Friendly and Fair Trade Wedding

When my husband and I became engaged in October 2009, we knew right away that our wedding would support eco-friendly and fair trade principles.

Being from two different countries and cultures, we had a small, intimate wedding in Australia to enable our immediate families to bond and develop a close relationship with each other.This didn't mean we cut down on any of the beautiful elegance that goes with weddings, and we had the most perfect day of our lives.

For both of us, part of the perfection was knowing that our special day helped uplift the lives of hundreds of strangers and give back to the environment - all through the decisions we made in planning our special day.

You can read more about our gorgeous day and the planning behind it in this article in Wedding Essentials magazine, but some snapshots included:

Our wedding rings were made from coyol seeds and stones handpicked from forest floors and river beds in Nicaragua and inlayed with recycled silver
I wore my mother's 44 year old dress, redesigned by wedding dress designer Dulce Torres using natural coffee dyes and wooden beads
My husband wore a suit he already owned and had tailormade in Thailand
My bridal bouquet was made from vintage buttons and felt, and still remains a conversation piece today
Our wedding invites were printed on fair trade paper sourced in the Philippines, and we designed a functional envelope to enclose them out of recycled rice sacks. The envelope can be used by guests as a document or passport holder
The covers for the order of service booklets were hand-painted by a Filipino flood-survivor on fair trade paper, and the order of service was printed on recycled paper by a local business
We served fair trade alamid coffee that was hand-collected by indigenous groups in the mountains of Mindoro in the Philippines (Alamid coffee is that special and expensive coffee that passes through the digestive system of the civet cat)
Our ceremony was held in Girraween National Park and our reception was at Felsberg Winery, local to my hometown. The grapes were grown and wine was produced onsite, and the food was locally-sourced where possible.
And, I could go on.... (please read the article for all the details)

When planning the wedding, I realised that it didn't matter whether 20 guests were attending or 200 - the planning stage was still the same and no detail was spared. It occured to me that I was lucky to be in Fair Trade networks in order to collate all the elements and know who to talk to in order to source and produce materials (as many of the elements were prototypes I developed). I wondered how easy it would be for others to have an eco-friendly wedding without access to these networks, and the idea for Eco-Friendly Wedding Coaching was born.