The Green Chica

on Jan 08 in Green Wedding, Wedding Flowers, Wedding Planner

I am happy to once again be working with Katie Martin, of Elegance & Simplicity, on this year’s Earth Day Wedding.  This will be the third wedding video I have donated for a good cause, championed by Katie, and the second in the name of green wedding practices.

Katie is a very busy woman.  Not only is she a fabulous wedding planner and an amazing florist under Elegance & Simplicity, she recently published a new online magazine – Eco Beautiful Weddings, is working on getting her third book completed and published, and runs the DC Green Wedding Consortium, of which I am proud to be a member.

I recently asked Katie a few questions about what makes an Eco Beautiful wedding.

What makes you a “green” vendor?

Everything from our wind-powered workshop and website to the flowers that we purchase are eco-friendly elements of an overall green mission that we have instilled in all of our employees and the way we run our business.

Being green is not just about our supply chain, it is about our outreach to the community locally and the environment at large.  We donate to local schools and help nourish local gardens from our in-house composting program and invest in international carbon offsetting programs along with other incredible forward-thinking and world changing organizations.

We also educate and help other wedding professionals about becoming a green!  We also are a source of eco-friendly wedding inspiration for brides around the world with the premiere of our new magazine Eco-Beautiful Weddings.  Our goal is to change the way brides plan their weddings from the beginning.  Being green does not mean wearing hemp on your wedding day and Eco-Beautiful Weddings helps show brides how to go eco-couture on their wedding day!

What are the top 3 things a bride can do to “green” her wedding?

1. Reduce the amount of out-of-town guests that will be traveling to your wedding.  Transportation is the biggest “eco-sin” when it comes to weddings!
2. Don’t serve red meat at your wedding.  Serve fish, chicken/fowl and/or vegetarian/vegan options instead. The amount of energy it takes to produce and digest red meat is staggering compared to the other options.
3. Choose décor and fashion items that come from renewable and free-trade and fair- wage resources.

As in all of your wedding planning visits…ask questions to see how green your vendors are.  You may be the catalyst to making a change, one vendor at a time.

Why is having a green wedding important?  What is the impact, if any?

Having a green wedding is about putting a fist up in the air at the wedding industrial complex as a whole.  It is saying that you want your wedding to make a difference.  You want your wedding to make a statement, to be a journey in education for you and your guests.  It means that your big day is giving back to a greater purpose.  If each engaged couple made at least one change in their wedding planning process, the world and the environment can literally be changed.  The impact is priceless and without measure.

Why do you care?

There are several reasons why I care about the environment and impacting the wedding industry.  One is that I come from a very different background than many players in the wedding industry.  I used to be a missionary in the Dominican Republic, which is one of the greenest countries in the world by necessity.  I am sure, at some point, if people do not change their ways in general – we will all need to be green by necessity.  After coming back from living in the slums of Santo Domingo, I knew (no matter where I worked) that I could not longer just live like I had before in conspicuous consumption.  So, I decided to make a difference in the wedding industry.  I soon found my job to make a difference to be harder than I thought.  Waste is the status quo in the wedding industry.  So I decided to not really tell my brides that I was making a difference and just did it on my own.  I researched all of my vendors – making sure they had a soul and a purpose behind what they do on wedding days.  I wanted to find the vendors that were making a difference in their own way.  Whether it was small or large statements, all of my vendors were either giving back to the community or making a difference in their art through their supply chain or just plain being innovative or different.

In the end, I just care, period.  I am a wife and a mother and I want a better world for myself and my son and everyone really!