The Green Bride Guide
Image: Author Kate L. Harrison with husband Barry Muchnick
The Green Bride Guide
The Green Bride Guide is a comprehensive and credible resource for eco-friendly wedding ideas, product and services. The site is a companion to The Green Bride Guide: How to Plan an Earth Friendly Wedding on Any Budget, written by Kate L. Harrison after she planned her green wedding in 2006-07. It offers pictures and stories from real green weddings, decor ideas, links to eco-friendly products and much much more!
Our Philosophy
The Green Bride Guide is committed to promoting environmental awareness and social change by offering ideas, facts, pictures and resources for planning a green wedding. Our goal is to help couples lessen their environmental footprint - by decreasing consumption, choosing renewable and sustainable products, composting, recycling and carbon offsetting.
The Green Bride Guide website is published by The Green Life Guides, LLC - a company that is committed to "walking the walk" (to being as green as we possibly can be). The following are some of the ways we incorporate our values into daily life at The Green Life Guides, LLC.
Supporting Renewable Energy
Our hosting company uses 100% wind power. This website is carbon negative, which means we actually ADD electricity back to the grid! We also provide visitors with a carbon calculator, so you can quickly and easily calculate the carbon footprint of your event and offset it. Brighter Planet invests the money in a diverse portfolio of projects, including tree planting and renewable energy projects. We chose them because of their outstanding reputation in the environmental community.
Paper Products
ALL of The Green Life Guide's paper goods are 100% recycled with as much PCW content as we can find. Our business cards and thank you cards are printed on 100% PCW recycled paper with soy inks. Whenever possible we communicate via e-mail and pay bills online to minimize waste. Our office recycles everything it can, and even our furniture is reclaimed and repurposed.
The book, The Green Bride Guide: How to Plan an Earth-friendly Wedding on Any Budget was printed on FSC certified recycled paper. This saved 142 trees, 99 million BTUs, 51,862 gallons of water, 12,495 lbs of greenhouse gases and 6,660 pounds of solid waste. For more information see the dedication page of The Green Bride Guide or visit www.fsc.org. When you buy the book directly from the author, Kate ships in a recycled paper mailer with vintage stamps.
Live Events
In 2009, The Green Life Guides, LLC began a partnership with CT Green Scene to produce several live events in the New England area. The goal of these events is to bring together eco-conscious couples and vendors of green products and services in an interactive environment. All of the food and flowers are organic, the events are powered by solar power generators and we use recycled and reclaimed runways for the fashion shows. In addition, we donate 10% of the proceeds to environmental charities.
Vendor Selection
Transparency is extremely important to us. Every vendor and product in our database has been carefully screened by our staff and we have developed a five leaf rating system to assess each company's commitment to the environment. Their leaf rating appears next to each product they list our shop. We are currently developing a service directory. Vendors who want to list in this directory must complete extensive questionnaires and publish their responses in their profile.
Supporting Recycling
The average wedding in the United States produces between 400 and 600 lbs of garbage! To help decrease the impact of these events, we have created a recycling & donation page, where couples can find everything from local thrift store listings to how to donate their gowns for breast cancer research. If you have another resource you would like added to this page please let us know!
More About Our Company
