A wedding emits 4.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide: Veggie Alive Kiln Pizza holds a green wedding
The elaborate formalities of a wedding often give couples a headache, but a wedding banquet can also be held in an eco-friendly and simple way without losing any of the etiquette. Dai Yun-si and Hsu Hung-hsiang, founders of "Veggie Kiln", famous at the National Tsing Hua University Bamboo Dragonfly Green Market for baking pizza with locally sourced ingredients, held a "green wedding" when they married last year. Not only did they put the eco-friendly, love-the-Earth philosophy into practice, they also took into account their elders' emphasis on traditional etiquette, and their family and friends experienced an alternative kind of wedding banquet together.
Traditional weddings have a big environmental impact; green weddings cut carbon and are eco-friendly
Dai Yun-si and Hsu Hung-hsiang have long taken part in the activities of the Society of Wilderness, and they ordinarily strive to reduce their burden on the environment. Before preparing for their wedding, Dai Yun-si first looked up statistics from the Environmental Protection Administration and found that the environmental impact of holding a wedding is quite astonishing. "A single wedding emits about 4.2 metric tons of carbon dioxide. With 100,000 weddings a year, that means 420,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, which would require 2,800 trees to absorb."
Thinking of how weddings are all about pomp, lighting and lavish feasts, "the whole wedding gets taken hostage by commerce," Dai Yun-si said. The two had originally wanted to do it in the simplest way possible -- just a "notarized marriage" -- but their elders still hoped for a formal ceremony, so they decided to combine the engagement and the wedding on the same day, invite only close friends and relatives to the banquet, and, to reduce carbon emissions, choose a banquet venue reachable in 10 minutes from home.
The two married last October, but began planning in February, putting eco-friendly ideas into practice in everything from the wedding photos, invitations, transportation and traditional wedding cakes to the dishes. To avoid wasting paper, the two first surveyed their family and friends: apart from mailing a small number of physical wedding invitations to relatives and friends who wanted to keep one as a memento or who did not use the internet, all the rest were sent as "e-invitations."
Dai Yun-si also thought, since a wedding is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, why not take the chance to "smuggle" the issues they ordinarily care about into the wedding?
When shooting their wedding photos, the two specially chose the Donghai Puyu fields in Zhubei, using the occasion to get their guests to care about the issue of land expropriation. Dai Yun-si keeps 2 adopted rabbits at home, so they also incorporated "adopt, don't buy" and an anti-nuclear flag into the photos, while Hsu Hung-hsiang found Taiwan lilies (Lilium formosanum) and soapberry (Sapindus mukorossi) as decorations, representing "a harmonious union lasting a hundred years" and "may you soon be blessed with a child" respectively, full of a rich sense of land and nature.
Looking back on the process of organizing the green wedding, the hardest part was communicating with their elders. Hsu Hung-hsiang said their elders might still value traditional etiquette, ceremonies or care about outsiders' opinions, "but we're grateful that our parents are very open-minded; once we explained, they could all understand."
Dai Yun-si also felt it was a bit of a pity that some things could not be done. For example, to emphasize energy saving they wanted to hold the wedding outdoors using natural light, but there could be hygiene issues, and because it was held at a hotel, it was still difficult to ask the chef to cook the dishes using designated local ingredients.
Still, Dai Yun-si and Hsu Hung-hsiang's green wedding did have a positive influence. Chen Hsiang-ching, a member of the Hsinchu branch of the Society of Wilderness, said this was her first time attending a green wedding. Apart from the proceedings not being extravagant or wasteful, she could feel the care in every small detail, and even other friends followed suit; for example, a couple recently asked a friend to help shoot their wedding photos, breaking the old impression that weddings are always "outsourced." A green wedding symbolizes not only the union of two people; if carbon reduction, local ingredients and issues of concern are incorporated into the wedding, family and friends can all be influenced by it.
A little knowledge: Couples who want to organize a green wedding can refer to some examples in the country; for example, a former researcher at the Taiwan Rural Front, in order to help small farmers market their agricultural products, used local ingredients for the wedding banquet dishes; Chang Yang-kan, deputy chief executive of the Delta Electronics Foundation, held a "lights-out wedding banquet" in Hong Kong, China to promote food carbon reduction, or refer to the Environmental Protection Administration's "A Hundred Years of Marital Harmony Green Wedding Guidebook".