Our Low Waste Wedding
Our wedding was in late Spring of 2018, but I have been meaning to share a full blog post with you all on how I aimed it towards the goal of zero waste!
We originally wanted to have a full-on wedding in Yosemite, a place dear to our hearts. But we didn’t have the budget to have it out there. Plus having a bunch of people drive up there when we could just have it in LA, wasn’t going to be that sustainable. So instead, we decided we would drive up to Yosemite a few days before the wedding, camp (yes, I got ready in the camp bathrooms lol), have our first look and exchange our vows in our wedding attire just us and our photographer and a couple of friends who were there to help. Then, have our actual legal wedding + reception in LA with close family and friends.
The reason why I aimed for our wedding to be as zero waste as possible, was for many reasons. In general, parties create A LOT of waste. From single use items for the food, food-waste, to the wedding dress or wedding party dresses + suits only being used for one night, to honestly useless party favors. I wanted to avoid all of that and conserve what we didn’t really need. I know that in general, to make clothes, it takes a ton a water, so I tried to find out how much is a wedding dress, it’s estimated that one wedding dress takes about 2377 gallons of water to make (I wrote this number down years ago and lost the original source). To conserve resources, I also wanted to include secondhand items as much as possible.
Our wedding attires
I was purposely trying to find a secondhand wedding dress, so on my first try to look for a dress I actually went to a BLDHN sample dress sale. Sample dresses are used for brides to try on dresses when they are looking for the “one”. So, sample dresses have been used many times! They can have a few stains, or few tears, but nothing too big that cannot be fixed. I grabbed 4 sample dresses, and one of them went home with me! I did have to make alterations, cut the length and fix it a bit in the chest area after taking it home, but that’s typical for wedding dresses. I also did the same for my wedding veil and found a sample one. I had a small bridal party, and instead of having them wear expensive dresses they weren’t going to wear again, they wore traditional Mexican embroidered dresses, two of three dresses were already in our closets! My husband wore an untraditional suit he put together that he could keep and wear again separately or together. I also didn’t bother with some new heals I wasn’t going to wear again, so I wore my comfortable hiking sandals for the wedding which have gone on many adventures with me!
Venue and decorations
We got married outdoors in a nursery! We actually didn’t need much decor because the venue itself was filled with beautiful plants! But we did get decor for the tables: table runners, flowers, some vases, reused kombucha bottles, and did succulents in terracotta pots. The table runners were actually made from three Mexican blankets that were cut up and fixed up on the ends. Our wedding welcome sign and gift box (we asked for no material gifts) and table cloth where it was set up, were secondhand from someone else’s wedding that I found on Offer up, and the cloth from The Left Bank. The name cards on tables were actually thrifted glasses with our guests’ names written on it, so they can use throughout the night for any drinks and take home if they liked. For our wedding favors I wanted to give something that was needed and/or consumable so that it wasn’t just junk that would sit on shelf and collect dust in people’s homes. So, we did soaps from No tox life with a compostable wrap on it. They also ended up doubling as escort cards! I cut up Trader Joe paper brown bags that I had in the house, to the size of the soap, wrote on them and slipped them right in with the wrapper! Also used the paper to cut our numbers for the tables. You will see in the picture!
Food and drinks
Our food was all vegan Mexican food from Just Vegana, a vegan cake from Yvonnes’s Cakes and as extra we have vegan conchas (sweet bread) from a local place near the venue called Delicias Bakery! For drinks we had kegs, agua frescas and water in a 5-gallon jug. I later realized my dad had shown up with a whole pack of plastic water bottles, which I didn’t want at the wedding lol, but it happened!
Here’s the part that didn’t work as planned. We wanted to rent dishes but that was out of our budget, so instead I ordered compostable palm leaf plates for the cake and wooden eating utensils, our vendor provided compostable plates for the dinner. The plan was to compost everything, but the compost never happened because I didn’t plan for it well, so it all went to the trash :(.
If you are in LA, you can get rentals and composting options from my friends over at Sustain LA!
So that was our Villasenor wedding! If you are planning for a future one, I hope that by me sharing this, it will give you some great ideas to keep yours more eco-friendly! Reuse, reduce, and refuse what you can. Aim for secondhand as much as possible, as there’s so much out there already! Look on facebook market, offer up, visit thrift stores and be patient :).