Looking for a way to go green with your wedding? Consider using eco-friendly wedding invitations! Shopping with sustainable vendors reduces your carbon footprint.

So, you’ve set the date for the big day, and you’re ready to announce it to the world in style.

Now, added to the towering stacks of fabric swatches and paint samples to consider are stationery samples too. But before you commit to a design for your invitations, perhaps pause and consider something often overlooked in the wedding industry: is it eco-friendly?

Kate Harrison cites in her book, The Green Bride Guide: How To Create An Earth-Friendly Wedding On Any Budget that the wedding industry produces approximately 1 billion pounds of garbage every year. Wedding invitations and other stationery such as menus and program cards are among the top contributors to this heap.

Considering the quickly deteriorating state of the global climate—melting glaciers, rising temperatures, superstorm hurricanes, rampant forest fires, and the list goes on—we need to consider the planetary impact in everything we do.

If tiny tweaks to your wedding decor plans can lighten the environmental load ever so slightly, we say—it’s worth it. As a newly engaged couple, you can get involved by doing your part in promoting eco-friendly weddings.

Why Consider Eco-Friendly Stationery for Wedding Invitations?

Your invites set the tone for your wedding.

Think of them as the dramatic endpapers or title page of a book: the details, the color, the font, the type and cut of the page all allude to what’s to come ahead. Starting off the wedding celebration with eco-friendly invitations signals to your guest list that you care about the environment.

Your wedding is different, because you are trying to be earth-conscious, and would like your guests to be as well.

In addition to being a statement piece, the right stationery can also materially contribute to making your wedding more sustainable. As eco-friendly stationery is often made of recycled paper, wood pulp, newspaper scraps, and spent grains, it will not increase your wedding’s carbon footprint—nothing new is being created for the purpose of the invite.

Which Materials Are Best For Eco-Friendly Invitations?

Considering the wealth of paper products already out in the world, finding the right material for eco-friendly wedding invitations is not a demanding task.

If you are hosting a rustic or woodland boho wedding, you can opt for plantable seed paper. This works as a combination invite and wedding favor! After the wedding, your guests can plant your invites and grow, say, poppies or daisies from the embedded seeds. The paper is 100% biodegradable as well.

If you’re planning a vintage-themed wedding, consider handmade recycled paper. Made from reclaimed fiber, newsprint, and other scraps, recycled paper comes in a number of colors and textures. Choosing handmade paper from a boutique vendor also supports local and small businesses. Other tree-free fibers like hemp and cotton are also more sustainable options, and the firm texture makes them great for gold foil printing and letterpress.

The modern minimalist might also lend that aesthetic to the stationery, and opt for small, pared-back wedding invitations on eco-friendly paper with only the most important information. Your guests can repurpose these simple cards as bookmarks. Another great way to cut back on waste is using both sides of the invitation, or getting rid of blank leaves.

DIY Your Invitations

While shopping around, also consider an extra-personal touch by making DIY (Do It Yourself) eco-friendly wedding invitations!

Create your own stationery—it’s easy to find videos on how to make paper from scratch on YouTube. You can even ask your entourage to help you, and make it into a fun pre-wedding event!

Or, if you want to fully cut carbon emissions and go as eco-friendly as possible, get rid of the stationery completely. Instead, send digital invitations. E-invites are cheaper, faster, and infinitely more sustainable. There are many designs to choose from, and you can even enclose an RSVP option so guests can answer virtually. The COVID-19 pandemic has seen couples lean into incorporating virtual elements like e-invites and streaming weddings—why not incorporate similar touches to make your wedding a little greener as well?

Celebrate Your Eco-Friendly Wedding With Afarose

While one person’s choices alone might not save the world, everyone doing so together can help.

In addition to opting for eco-friendly wedding invitations, a few other changes can also make your wedding more sustainable. For example, ask your caterer to create a menu using locally sourced ingredients. Fewer large shipments of food and beverage reduce fuel consumption while adding a local touch to your dinner table. If your theme requires props and decorations, choose biodegradable materials such as flowers, leaves, and cloth when possible. A beachside destination wedding decked out in wildflowers and repurposed sun-bleached driftwood is both sustainable and stunning.

Green weddings are simply just more economical.

Since most of the material used is locally available or repurposed, transportation and manufacturing cost is significantly lower. While truly zero-waste wedding dresses may not be abundant on the market, collaborating with vendors who take sustainability seriously, like Afarose, ensures that you are at least on the right track.

Rather than opening a traditional brick-and-mortar location, founders Irene and Eric Yeh decided to use their decades of experience in the wedding textile industry to launch Afarose, an entirely online bespoke bridal dress shop, in 2019. Since physical stores create more environmental and energy waste than an e-commerce model, the Yeh family took the sustainable route.

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All Afarose dresses are made to order, cutting back on overproduction waste.

Sure, mass manufacturing dresses might trim production costs for some companies, but Afarose chooses to execute their stunning designs while reducing their carbon footprint instead! Dresses like Moonstone, Hana, and Mirabelle are crafted exactly to your specifications, reducing fabric waste. The bespoke process also means they can consciously recycle, reuse, and create new designs from leftover fabric as well, to cut down on scraps.

Pairing with vendors who consider sustainability can help you go green for your wedding. From invitations to decor, to the dress, there are plenty of ways to make your wedding eco-friendly.

Reach out to Afarose today to book a virtual styling session and find your perfect environmentally-friendly wedding gown.