Tips to Make Your Wedding Kinder to the Environment

Planning and pulling off your perfect wedding day is no easy task. It can feel like a mountain of work, with lots of rules you’re supposed to follow and things you’re just supposed to know. 

The reality is, there are no rules and you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. It should be about you two and what you want your wedding day to be for you and your loved ones. 

While some traditions are withstanding and have survived generations, other traditions have long since disappeared. Today we see a huge shift towards sustainability in our everyday lives; electric cars, removal of single use plastics, eco-friendly cleaning products and preloved clothing being just a few examples.

It’s no secret that the wedding industry generates A LOT of waste (the stats can be quite eye watering) a recent study by Austen & Blake Jewellers found that the average wedding un the UK produced one third of a metric tonne of waste.

We all know the importance of protecting our environment but we also want to have a wedding to remember without feeling like we’re missing out.

Today we’re talking tips to make your wedding kinder to the environment so you can have the wedding you’ve dreamed of, guilt free!

Top Tips for a Sustainable Wedding

  • Avoid Fast Fashion

  • Hiring Wedding Decor

  • Choose Your Wedding Suppliers Wisely

  • Stay Local

  • Confetti Alternatives

  • Gifts & Favours

Avoid Fast Fashion

It’s so easy to be seduced by fast fashion due to its affordability, especially when you’re faced with buying 6 identical dresses for your bridal party. Spending that little bit more on something not only more ethically sourced but also likely much higher in quality is something we should all be aiming to do, not just for weddings.

If you’re working with a smaller budget consider hiring your bridesmaid dresses. It’s been completely normal to hire mens suits for a wedding for as long as I can remember, it’s about time we made this the norm for the girls too. 

Hiring wedding garments shouldn’t just end there, hiring your wedding dress is an amazing way to get the label you want without the price tag. Of course buying a dress through a designer isn’t fast fashion particularly if you’re buying from a designer who manufactures in this country, but the idea of a dress only being worn once and sitting in a cupboard doesn’t seem the most sustainable option.

Conversely, the concept of a dress bringing joy to more than one person at many weddings is not only an incredibly sustainable ethos, it’s a really beautiful idea too. 

  • The Loop offer preloved luxury bridal wear, so you’re being kinder to the environment as well as wearing the glam dress you have always dreamed of.

  • Something Borrowed Rent has the same concept, where you can rent elegant wedding dresses, bridesmaids' dresses, and bridal accessories.

  • Brides Do Good goes one step further with ONE THIRD of their profits going to charity!

If you don’t like the idea of renting a dress, or you are worried your plans might involve getting the dress really dirty, then another eco-friendly option is to buy a second hand wedding dress. I did this for my own wedding!

  •  Still White  is the largest online wedding dress market, perfect for a bargain-loving bride. Buying directly from brides and bridal shops alike, you’ll find a mixture of used dresses, dresses with tags and ex store samples!

  • The Wedding Club are a sample sale line from a leading luxury designer retailer offering some of the biggest names in wedding fashion. 

Finally, if you strongly feel that the process of finding your dress and buying it new is an experience you don’t want to miss out on you won’t find any judgement here! If buying a new dress is the route for you, consider selling your dress on after the big day.

Either to another bride directly or to a company who will rent it out, it’s a great way to recoup some costs after your day and make that big designer label a little more achievable.

Hiring Wedding Decor

When it comes to eco-friendly wedding decor, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the DIY approach is the best option, when in reality it’s probably one of the worst.

While finding a venue that needs little to no decoration is the best bet here, you’re likely still going to want to personalise your wedding decor. This is where hiring your wedding decor comes up trumps. No need to spend months collecting items that will end up in your spare room for too long after your wedding, waiting for you to sell it, before ultimately ending up at the local tip. 

Hiring your wedding decor sounds expensive, however the reality is the hire prices per item are much less than you could buy these items for yourself, even if you were thrifting them!

You also have the option for someone to come and decorate for you, reducing stress and clean-up because they’ll also take it all away. Bliss.

Choose Your Wedding Suppliers Wisely

When researching and choosing your wedding suppliers, try to work with businesses that promote sustainability to help make your wedding kinder to the environment!

Some examples of this:

  • Florists that use seasonal flowers sourced from the UK. 

  • Make-up artists using natural products.

  • Caterers who grow their own produce and source locally.

  • Venues actively reducing their waste.

  • Suppliers donating a percentage of profits to trusts/charities.

These are just a few examples of small things that can all add up to make a big difference!

Another way to try and reduce waste is to speak to your venue about the dates either side of your booking, in a bid to share some elements of your day. Chances are the weddings either side of your day will be complete strangers so you don’t need to worry about people seeing the same thing. Marquee hire, large floral installations, table and decor hire are just a few examples where this can dramatically reduce your costs while minimising waste.

Stay Local

A really simple and often overlooked way to make your wedding more sustainable is to stay local!

By choosing local accommodation, this reduces the amount of travel for you, and for your guests, and of course, less travel is always eco-friendly.

Additionally sourcing local suppliers is key! While it’s tempting to bring in those suppliers you saw in that viral reel, there’s an abundance of talent and amazing suppliers right on your doorstep. I would definitely encourage you to search hashtags for weddings in the area and see who pops up.

After saying all of that, If your local area just isn’t somewhere you see yourselves getting married, but you still want to have an eco-friendly wedding, consider eloping! Or at the very least holding a micro wedding, this will greatly reduce the number of guests, meaning less people travelling, as well as reducing the number of suppliers needed and overall waste, not to mention saving you a bunch of money in the process! 

Let’s get into some statistics about why making your wedding kinder to the environment is important…

  • On average, locations are the most expensive part of a wedding costing an average of £8,479.80 (Knot)

  • Around £488 is wasted on food at every wedding. (77 Diamonds)

  • 15% of people would only eat one or two of their three courses. (77 Diamonds)

  • 15% of newlyweds would throw the remains of their cake away. (77 Diamonds)

  • 37% of guests don’t eat edible wedding favours. (77 Diamonds)

  • 4,910 tonnes of unrecyclable plastic was used up and left behind at British weddings last year. (77 Diamonds)

Confetti Alternatives

Confetti is synonymous with weddings. We all see the pretty pictures and videos, of people gleefully throwing handfuls over the newlyweds, it’s a sight that evokes joy for sure. What you don’t see is the clean up operation at the venue afterwards and the lasting damage when the wrong confetti is used, for example foil or plastic.

While biodegradable confetti is available, it’s not what you’d imagine and still takes time to degrade. Venues still need to clean up this confetti which ultimately makes its way into general non recycled waste. To aid this you could opt for really large confetti or streamers even ribbons, which are not only much easier to clean up and recycle, they will arguably (from my experience) look miles better on camera! Go big or go home!

Alternatives to confetti that make your wedding kinder to the environment are dried petals, which smell great and when collected not bought they add an element of meaning and sentiment not always present. The downside to them is that they don’t always look great on camera.


Gifts and Favours

First let’s talk about those cute presents for your bridesmaid and groomsmen. Matching PJs, hip-flasks,that sort of thing. These thoughtful gifts are a great way to thank those that have helped you in the run up to your day however they are often sourced from online shops with temptingly low prices, especially when you can be buying 6 of each! This puts us back in the fast fashion realm - which isn’t sustainable.

Consider if you really need to give a gift, or if the money can be spent and benefited from elsewhere? If you do want to get gifts, consider shopping small or local. If you do need to use some of the bigger companies, see if they have any sustainability messaging as their brand ethos..

Secondly let’s talk about favours. There are so many options when it comes to wedding favours, scratch cards, miniature spirits, chocolates etc… the sorry reality is, many of these get left on the tables and forgotten about as the drinks flow and the evening moves on. You would be surprised how many favours end up in the bin! Yet more non recyclable waste.

Consider letting your guests choose a charity to donate to on their behalf, a multiple choice card on the back of the menu!

Here are some of my favourite local eco and sustainability charities:


Eco-Friendly Wedding Ready!

My final tip to make your wedding kinder to the environment is to make sure your wedding photographer supports sustainability!


I really believe there are lots of little things we can do to support the environment in our daily lives and in our wedding plans without having to make drastic changes to how we live or the things we want for our big day. I’d love to help you capture the wedding of your dreams - get in touch with me here to work together, I can’t wait to hear from you!