The carbon neutral wedding: go eco where you can and offset the rest

Try as you might, the perfect eco-friendly wedding is pretty hard to do. Having a carbon neutral wedding is quite easy.

Weddings, especially destination weddings or weddings with many out-of-town guests, can generate several tons of carbon; some estimates put the average wedding at 50 tons of carbon (other estimates put it at a significantly lower 15 tons, but it's still a lot of carbon), considering the average North American household generates between 12 to 20 tons per year. That's a lot of carbon for a 1 day event.

Calculate your wedding carbon footprint with Terrapass' Wedding Carbon Footprint Calculator.

It's really tough to do the perfect zero-footprint wedding, and to be honest, you'd be making a lot of sacrifices that you may not be willing to make. It's still your wedding, and it's a (hopefully) once in a lifetime event.What can you do? Make your wedding as green as possible, and buy carbon offsets to take care of the rest.

What are carbon offsets?

Basically, when you buy a carbon offset, you are funding projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These projects include things like reforestation, building wind power generation farms, funding geothermal power projects, increasing the energy efficiency of transportation, and so on.

However, not all carbon offset credits are created equal. The best carbon credits are the Gold Standard credits:

"The Gold Standard is widely considered to be the highest standard in the world for carbon offsets. It ensures that key environmental criteria have been met by offset projects that carry its label. Significantly, only offsets from energy efficiency and renewable energy projects qualify for the Gold Standard, as these projects encourage a shift away from fossil fuel use and carry inherently low environmental risks. Tree planting projects are explicitly excluded by The Gold Standard." ~ The David Suzuki Foundation

For a long technical paper comparing carbon offsets, click here (pdf), or check out this list of carbon offset credit providers.

Offsetting your wedding

For about $10/ton, you can offset your wedding and support green initiatives around the world. Several organizations have wedding carbon calculators, and if you offset your wedding, they will send you a certificate that you can add to your wedding memorabilia album.

Check out the following organizations for wedding carbon offset credits:

CarbonFund.org ZeroCarbon^TM Weddings
Terrapass.com Wedding Terrapass

Published by Dave on Sep 4th, 2007 in Environmental Impact