Greening the Wedding

It has been our intention all along to make this wedding as green as possible. Nick voted for email invitations, but I was too traditional and killed a bunch of trees in making the invites, my apologies. We are trying to find balance here. These are some of the ways we have chosen environmentally friendly options:

1. A friend of Nick's is making our wedding bands using ethical gold from Australia. For more on how the gold mining industry impact's the environment go to no dirty gold or read more about it here.

2. I have decided to go with small, local businesses to provide us with many of the services for the wedding, from the cupcakes to the photography to the dress being made. Everyone I am hiring is part of a new, young business that they are growing. They are all creative and local people and not only is this friendly to the environment, but I am proud to be supporting artists and craftspeople in their work.

3. The wedding meal is being prepared from all local and organic produce from the Laurentians, the region of Quebec where CAMMAC is located. For more information on changing our buying habits when it comes to food, go to the 100 Mile Diet.

4. At the moment we are looking into bringing in all the wine from local vineyards. Quebec has a very small wine industry and this is another way of supporting local industry.

5. We hope to organize a bus to transport a lot of guests up to CAMMAC and back. We would also like to do as much carpooling as possible, so if you are driving up and have room in your car, please let us know.

6. The site itself is an eco-building and we are having the wedding in a beautiful, natural setting.

Speaking of carbon emissions, one of my greatest concerns is that we are asking a lot of you to fly from very far away. There are ways to actually lessen the impact your flights have on the environment. Organizations have started putting together projects you can invest in to help reduce greenhouse gases. Their websites have a carbon calculator where you can work out how much co2 your flight incurred, they then translate that into dollars that get invested into projects to offset those emissions. It is called Carbon Offsetting

Here are some of the best organizations around for carbon offsets. We leave it up to your own discretion and beliefs:
Carbon Neutral
Climate Care
Climate Friendly (and this one is Australian!)
Climate Trust

In the end it is better to reduce one's emissions by not flying at all, or as little as possible. But we selfishly want you here, so this patch up job for the planet is the next best thing.