#Circular Wedding
This is a slightly modified and less colourful version of the guide from http://www.socialcirculareconomy.com/circular-wedding.html
#Introduction
One of the most extravagant things that some people end up doing is having a wedding. With that in mind, when we decided to get married, we wanted to be as circular as we possible and where we could, link up with community organisations that help society.
Not only did we enjoy and learn from the process of putting together our circular wedding, it has seemingly caught other peopleâs imaginations, making itâs way into various news outlets and magazines. So in case we can inspire others to consider doing the same, we hope the guide below will make it easier for you.
#Summary
This guide describes how to go about designing and planning a circular economy themed wedding. While this is framed for a wedding, it should be possible to apply similar principles for an event or big party. I intersperse this guide with how we went about it as an example (in italics bounded by 
emojis). We would love to hear from you if you have tried anything similar, are planning a circular wedding or have any useful suggestions for what else could be added to the guideline.
#Guide
Why did we do it? When we decided to have a wedding, it was always going to have a thought around minimising environmental impact as that aligns with our personal values. However a conversation with Nicole Barton from Cambridge Carbon Footprint cemented the desire to make it a whole theme. It made perfect sense as I am a circular economy geek and thus it would actually make the wedding more personal and special.
##Resources
###Number of people:
minimum 2! A wedding planner would be of value but certainly not needed; if you have the budget or a willing volunteer, it may be worth considering.
It should be noted that to ensure the right level of scrutiny on provenance of food, drink, etc. itâs highly likely youâll have to deal with more suppliers than an average wedding; wedding packages offered by venues are unlikely to be setup to ensure a circular service. This means itâs worth lining up volunteers for the day before and on the day to take care of certain tasks e.g. meeting a supplier and making sure things are as they should be.
###Tools/skills:
nothing in particular - we found a spreadsheet to keep track of things and a task list helped.
###Time:
as much as you care to! Going back to the point made above, putting on a circular wedding means a willingness to do due diligence, talk, meet, select and keep in contact with a number of suppliers, but thatâs unlikely to be radically different to less circular weddings.
##Steps
The following steps will refer to a typical secular British wedding and thus needs to be adapted to suit local cultural differences. The steps are in vaguely chronological order but in reality most things can / should be run in parallel. It is also not an exhaustive list covering all possible elements as we did not stick very closely to convention, leaning towards informality and stripping things back we did not want or felt were superfluous.
###Principles:
It is important to remember the waste hierarchy during the whole process - reduce, reuse, recycle, etc. Also Think Local was a key tenet in âdesigningâ our wedding. Circular strategies we used will be highlighted throughout the following in bold italic.
###Set a date and a budget youâre comfortable with:
Note, while budget was not a primary concern for us (we actually focused on number of guests), a circular wedding tends to remove ânice to havesâ and focuses on hire over buy and reuse over new. Therefore we found without particularly aiming to that our costs were significantly lower than an average UK wedding.
###Set the number of guests:
the guidance would be fewer the better (reduce). Of course it is not linear, but a good proxy for halving environmental impact is to halve the number of guests. A further consideration, difficult if you have close relatives who live far away, is if there is an opportunity to reduce the number of guests that have to take long-haul flights, it will significantly decrease the weddingâs carbon footprint.
We were probably not as rigorous here as we could have been â our guest list was similar to the UK average, while having close family across the world meant that a handful of our guestsâ made up the vast majority of the carbon footprint.
###Wedding website:
virtualise/dematerialise - a wedding website and emails as the main mode of interaction with guests increases convenience, allows changes, reduces footprint by going paperless instead of physical Save-the-date cards and Invitations. It also enables additional information like the Registry, photos and promotion of circular economy. If you are running a circular wedding, it of course makes sense to use the opportunity with a group of people who you will have more influence with than others to persuade them to be more circular and thus increase your positive impact.
A not particularly circular but clear benefit of the paperless approach was putting a page of photos of the two of us; âGrowing upâ with baby photos and âGrowing (up) togetherâ from our adventures together. This was something we wouldnât realistically be able to do share through physical invites etc. and was very well received, giving guests a further insight into our lives. We did consider printing the photos for somewhere in the reception but decided to save the trees instead.
###Save-the-date and Invitations:
as above, aim to virtualise/dematerialise these using a website and emails to communicate with your guests. If you canât wrench yourself away from convention, try to at least omit the Save-the-date card and go for recycled/biodegradable options
###Registry:
considering âstuffâ is responsible for more than 40% of our environmental footprint, this is a great place to use reduce or virtualise/dematerialise strategies i.e. request no gifts or dematerialised gifts. Dematerialised gifts could be services, memberships, donations to charity or a financial contribution toward a honeymoon or future home. If all of these options arenât for you and you canât bring yourself to dematerialise then there are registries that pick ecologically sound products made from sustainable inputs. There are also online curated shops that focus on high quality reusable items that will last a life time e.g. cast iron cooking pots.
###Rings:
here reuse over new is highly preferable, particularly as they are generally made of metal meaning significant energy is used for manufacture. Some people will have a family heirloom that they can reuse. If it has to be new, aim to pick something made from sustainable inputs, perhaps a wooden ring. It is of course possible to go down the reduce strategy i.e. not having a wedding ring at all, but this may be too unconventional for most.
###Clothes:
like rings, the best practicable strategy is reuse then sustainable inputs - reduce may not go down too well with guests! For reuse, it may be possible to wear a family memberâs, buy second hand, or hire.
###Beauty:
hair, make-up, spa, etc. These are generally service oriented so beyond using beauty products made from sustainable inputs and/or finding social enterprises who offered these services, there is limited gains using (social) circular economy principles.
###Photographer:
virtualise/dematerialise i.e. go digital with the photography
###Venue:
a few things worth considering here:
a) Reduce net travel for the guest list: A destination wedding or somewhere far from public transport necessitates a much larger travel carbon footprint. A very rural country house may be a beautiful setting but may necessitate the whole guest list drive, adding significantly to carbon footprint.
b) Reduce distance between ceremony and reception: moving lots of people a long distance between ceremony and reception sites not only is logistically tricky, it also requires energy, typically using fossil fuels and thus producing emissions. Best to have the two parts of the wedding in the same location or at least close to reduce transportation requirements.
c) A natural setting: reduces the need for lighting and heating can make a significant difference. Itâs more beautiful too!
d) Ensure leasing: hire linen, glasses, crockery, cutlery and other utensils from the venue i.e. reuse of these items and not having to either procure new or using disposable options (i.e. minimise waste);
e) Optimise utilisation: pick an appropriate setting for the guest list size which will help to minimise waste. For example, there is no point having 50 people at a venue that can hold 400 as the energy and materials required for lighting, heating, decorations, etc. will effectively be wasted.
We were keen to have a green ambience for the wedding and make use of the warmth and long summer day without even considering the bonus of reduced energy burden. We ended up going very local, picking The Orchard Tea Garden in Grantchester, just outside Cambridge, a beautiful and serene apple orchard that has hosted a bewildering array of historic figures including Stephen Hawking, Rupert Brooke, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw and John Maynard Keynes to name a few. It perfectly matched the informal vibe that we wanted and fit with the activities and entertainment we wished to have outside.
We hired one large room that could just fit all our guests in case of rain where the food/drink was stationed with seating too. The room had open French doors to allow access to the outside. We were lucky to have brilliant weather all day so most people spent their time outside. The venue provided all the glasses, plates, cutlery, toilet facilities, etc. we needed so none of that had to be bought or brought in separately.
###Flowers:
unless using fake flowers, reuse type strategies are not feasible. The aim here is to source sustainably and choose local, in-season flowers wherever possible. One option is to forage wild flowers or pick from your garden.
###Decorations:
decorations vary widely so there isnât much to say except to remind to keep in mind that tighter circles are better i.e. reduce, reuse, recycle.
###Transportation (optional):
this encapsulates two areas. One is how guests come to the wedding and the other is perhaps better termed âlast mile logisticsâ, once folk have arrived in the vicinity. This could be to get people from an obvious central meeting point to your wedding location or to move people a short distance from the ceremony to the reception.
For getting to the wedding, it is worth using the wedding website to outline what are the greener modes of transport and encourage guests to take them.
For last mile logistics, we recommend using a quirky zero/low emission transport options to reduce your impact e.g. hiring a fleet of rickshaws, partybike (aka âpedibusâ), electric cars, pedalos etc. The best may just simply be to walk!
Consider making the last mile logistics part of the entertainment itself rather than a necessary evil to be minimised. This approach decreases the stress of trying to keep to a strict schedule, and slowing down to enjoy it means that human-powered transport options are brought into play. Consider which youâd prefer, trying to load everyone into a fleet of minibuses to get them to the reception in 30 minutes or a 3-hour relaxed walk with a drink at a pub halfway?
###Entertainment:
can come in all shapes and sizes, so the advice must be relatively generic i.e. think about tighter loops first, minimise waste and use sustainable inputs where possible. Good strategies are using services in order to virtualise/dematerialise (magicians, comedians, musicians), hiring i.e. optimise utilisation of stuff, and reusing and repurposing things you already have. Some people like to go extravagant e.g. fireworks as a big send-off but this is of course not aligned with a circular wedding so ensure these types of activity are reduced.
For music we had two types; we had cello/violin and flute/piano duets early on as we were lucky enough to have highly competent musicians in family and guests. After sunset, we put on the hired silent disco equipment which was very well received. We chose this route for a bunch of reasons:
- Not to annoy our neighbours;
- Allow folk to talk to each other without shouting;
- Allow folk to dance outside;
- Less energy needed; and
- Give a choice of three music channels for the listener to decide on.
###Speeches:
while you have an audience whom you will have significantly more influence over than other people, try to convince your guests to adopt circular economy into their own lives, especially where it can be done at community level and help people at the same time.
###Food and drink:
While itâs difficult to know the exact impact of food, a good rule of thumb is to pick seasonal, local and organic i.e. use the sustainable inputs strategy. It may not be possible to have the venue caterer use these sources but it is worth asking the chef. To best ensure the right inputs however, it is likely that you will have to source them yourselves or at least get a separate caterer that shares the same values.
Another important way of reducing footprint is to reduce or eliminate meat; beef and lamb typically have significantly higher footprints than pork which is higher than chicken and fish.
While sustainable inputs may seem like the only circular economy strategy, in fact recovering surplus food i.e. minimising waste is another. There are increasingly a variety of organisations that may be able to assist to source this - typically supply volume is relatively constant but is variable in content e.g. supermarkets will tend to have a lot of surplus food going every day that will otherwise go to waste but it could be a lot of carrots one day and apples the next. Therefore, there needs to be a degree of flexibility on the menu to allow a snap decision once it is known what the recovered food is.
FoodCycle took care of the majority of the food needs but we also wanted to reflect a little of our own heritage. So we found local suppliers to serve up a few morsels from our different cultures:
a) British: Gorgeous strawberries grown locally. We also had the FoodCycle scones for dessert.
b) South African: here we meat cheated. We sourced biltong and boerewors from an award-winning South African butcher from a nearby town; they also do a scrumptious melktert, a classic milk-based tart.
c) Japanese: sushi and homemade dorayaki desserts, a childhood favourite.
d) American: FoodCycle made mac 'nâ cheese and apple pie. The intention was also to have CamCattle meat (cows fed on commons land in and around Cambridge) in sliders (mini burgers) but unfortunately this didnât work out.
Cake: we skipped the traditional cake and opted for the various desserts mentioned above from our heritages, allowing guests to mix and match what they wanted.
Drinks: We were keen to source as local as possible so ended up tasting with increasing radius until things passed a âgood enoughâ threshold.
Wine: The UK is not known for its wine but there is a growing number of vineyards. We got some white wine from Chilford Hall about 15km from us but had to go a little more south (more sun!) for the sparkling options. We found a lovely sparkling rosé from Dedham Vale (~60km) and a white sparkling wine from Chapel Down in Kent. We managed to circumvent making a potentially unnecessary visit to both by getting a bottle of each to taste from a local supermarket. We never found an appealing English red so we took the reduce option here i.e. eliminated it.
Beer and cider: we went with Lord Conradâs based less than 10km away. The beers taste great and are brewed from local sustainably sourced ingredients. Even the waste water is returned safely. We sourced our cider from the Cambridge Cider Company via the same brewery.
Other: we stuck with Pimmâs, Cambridgeshire apple juices (Watergull Orchards) and local gins.
###Favours:
either choose the reduce option i.e. eliminate it or go for something meaningful with home-made items from repurposed / reused materials or sustainable inputs.
###Honeymoon:
here the more local you can go the better i.e. reduce the distance and thus footprint. Of course there is a tension of going somewhere further for something more exotic and different, versus staying local which may seem less special.
It is worth considering that there is often a misconception that flights are particularly more polluting than car travel. The main thing is that itâs much easier to rack up the miles on an airplane very quickly â an occasional driver may take a year to drive 5,000km but you could do that in a six hour flight. Trains are typically much better from an emissions perspective. Using terrestrial forms of transportation generally slows you down meaning lower impact.
###Carbon offset:
is a way to reduce, or rather counteract, the emissions you canât prevent. It can help to mitigate climate change and often provides support for impoverished communities. Of course it requires measuring your footprint which helps to manage and thus hopefully reduce it to start with; but for unavoidable negative impact, it can be a useful mitigation tool.