When 30 year old bride Lucy Bannister married her beau earlier this month she determined that she would reduce the carbon footprint left by her nuptials.

Lucy’s wedding gown was made by recycling a dress from the 1950’s and the wedding rings were fashioned from melted down gold from jewellery donated from various members of her family.

Many of the wedding party arrived at the wedding using local transport at Lucy’s request and carried home produced lanterns made using jam jars and tea lights to light up the reception.

All in all, environmentally conscious Lucy traded her traditional white wedding for an eco-friendly green wedding which cost a fraction of the price of a standard wedding at just £4,000.

After the wedding the newlyweds recycled everything from their wedding at a vintage wedding fair.

She said: -

“We decided we didn’t want to be wasteful.

I used my mum’s wedding ring and my first ever earrings from when I had my ears pierced along with lots of other bits of jewellery collected from our family, so the rings were from recycled gold and meant even more than buying them from a shop,”

The average wedding costs the earth in every sense. There is a huge amount of waste thanks to all the stuff that gets bought then thrown away and from the guests travelling by car to the event.”

Lucy and her new husband Stuart decided against issuing wasteful paper invitations and constructed a website which featured and online initiation and sent a link to the website to all of their guests by email.

Their wedding party consisted of guests from various parts of the country so the couple chose to hold their wedding reception in the Peak District in a location that could be reached very easily by public transport.

Lucy commented:-

“We encouraged people to come by train and bus or to car- share and to bring their tents.

We all camped, which was good because it cut the cost for everyone. When you go to a wedding these days it costs a fortune paying for accommodation. We also said there was no need to buy a new outfit for the event.”

Tags: eco-wedding, environmentally friendly wedding, green wedding

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 at 7:23 pm and is filed under General, News, Wedding Day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.