How to Plan a More Sustainable Wedding

Aug 4

Insights from Corina Beczner, Founder of Vibrant Events

Wedding planner Corina Beczner believes sustainability isn't about sacrificing beauty—it's about letting nature become your greatest source of inspiration.

Walk through a forest after a storm and you'll notice something remarkable: there is no garbage. Fallen branches become homes for insects. Leaves become soil. One season's ending becomes the next season's beginning.

What if a wedding worked the same way? This is the kind of question that wedding planner Corina Beczner has spent many hours contemplating.

Beczner, who earned an MBA in Sustainable Management, did not originally foresee a career as a wedding planner. She had an epiphany, though, after “coming out of the closet” as a major Martha Stewart fan while in business school. Researching the intersection of wedding planning and environmental sustainability, she was struck by the lack of resources available to green-minded couples. In 2006 she launched Vibrant Events, an events business focused on serving clients who value health and environmental sustainability.

If Nature planned a wedding, what would it look like?

Since then she has planned hundreds of events across the globe and seen her work published in the likes of Style Me Pretty, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Junebug Weddings. She has worked with an extraordinary community of chefs, farmers, florists, artisans, and makers, and remembers events where nearly everything—from the fish to the flowers—came from within a few miles of the venue.

Beczner and I first met in 2008, while working on a wedding for which she was the planner and I was the photographer. The wedding took place on the shore of a lake deep in the redwood forests of Mendocino County, surrounded by 4,000 acres of wilderness. Even then, I knew that Beczner was thinking about weddings differently than anyone else I'd met. Today, nearly two decades later, the same is still true.

Ceremony spot of the wedding we worked on together in 2008

Last year we sat down for another wide-ranging conversation on the matter. What, I wanted to know, were the most impactful ways of making a wedding more “green?” In other words, if Nature planned a wedding, what would it look like?

“All of the materials and guests would, of course, be local and organic,” said Beczner, smiling. “It would be a zero-waste affair, full of natural beauty.”

To Beczner, sustainability isn't about asking couples to sacrifice beauty. It's about paying closer attention—to where things come from, how they're made, and where they'll go when the celebration ends.

“How green a wedding or event is can be measured in different ways,” said Beczner. “But one of the most powerful is by calculating its carbon footprint.”

A carbon footprint measures the greenhouse gases produced by human activities. The average American wedding produces roughly 56 metric tons of greenhouse gasses. It also produces an average of 400 pounds of garbage. For many couples, that cost is too much. How, then, does one go about decreasing that footprint?

Beczner helps couples focus on four main areas:

🌿Start Local:

Of all the factors contributing to the average wedding’s carbon footprint, transportation is by far the highest. With one round trip transcontinental airplane flight emitting around 1.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide per person, having 30 people coming from across the country immediately means 45 tons of carbon emissions. Ordering flowers or other supplies from far away adds to that total.

This means that focusing on all things local can make a big difference. A wedding couple may choose to serve fish from a local fisherman, fruits and vegetables from a local farmer, and/or decorations from local artisans. For VIP guests coming from far away, couples might choose to schedule their event at a time when those people might have been planning to come already, like the summer or the winter holidays. Keeping the gathering and guest list small and intimate can decrease the carbon footprint considerably.

2. 🏡 Consider the (Energy) Source:

Couples can also lower the event’s carbon footprint by choosing to host their event at a location that prioritizes energy efficiency. Buildings that are LEED certified, use solar power, and/or use energy efficient lights and appliances can all notably bring down the total emissions of the event.

3. 🍽️ Feed People Well:

Another important opportunity for decreasing environmental impact exists in the food chosen for the event. Couples can focus “climate cuisine” - a sustainable cooking philosophy that prioritizes biodiverse, plant-forward, and low-waste ingredients. Beczner encourages couples to limit land animals in their wedding menus by either creating a plant-rich menu or using local, sustainable seafood options. If land animals are used, she encourages local, wild-hunted, like boar, or family farm raised beef from animals who have lived a great life.

4. ♻️ Design Out Waste:

Finally, Beczner helps clients look at minimizing their event waste, using the well-known three R formula: “Reduce, reuse, recycle.” To this she adds one additional R: restore. This means healing environmental damage or restoring an environment to its natural state, something many of Beczer’s couples choose to support in ways both connected to and beyond their weddings. Some buy carbon offsets that fund external projects that reduce or remove greenhouse gasses from the planet. They may explain why to their guests, and/or encourage them to do the same.

Beczner also recommends clients source toxic-free, local, seasonal, and reused materials wherever possible. She helps ensure that at the end of the event all organic material is composted rather than put into landfills.

Beczner’s work underscores something I’ve seen many times in my years of photographing weddings - that the most beautiful weddings aren't beautiful despite their values. They're beautiful because those values shaped every decision. Beczner is on a mission to make sure that more and more weddings become expressions of that beautiful idea.