A green and white pocketfold invitation made from recycled card

Eco friendly wedding invites and stationery: 5 ways to make your wedding more sustainable

Eco friendly wedding invites and stationery are a great way to make your wedding that little bit more sustainable. Now I know that things made from paper and card and not in the purest sense ‘eco friendly’, but my ethos is all about making little changes that go in the right direction rather than getting it 100% perfect. There are a few tweaks you can make to your wedding invitations and stationery to make them more eco friendly without compromising on style or quality. Here’s my top 5.

a pretty white and green flowery eco friendly wedding invite

1 Only buy what you need

One of the biggest problems our planet faces is over consumption and waste. I think David Attenborough summed it up perfectly:

“Don’t waste electricity, don’t waste paper, don’t waste food. Live the way you want to live but just don’t waste.”1

How does this apply to wedding invites? Easy, only order the quantities that you actually need. It’s so tempting to go overboard with the ‘spares just in case’ or ‘just round up to the nearest big number’. Truth is, you really don’t need to. A little forward thinking and checking numbers on the guest list will give you a fairly accurate idea of exactly what invitations and stationery you do and don’t need. Order those numbers, of course include a spare or two and a keepsake for yourselves, but don’t go mad. They’ll only go to waste. I have a very low minimum order and you can order most of my stationery items in multiples of 1, so you should never have to have more than you need.

blue pocketfold eco friendly wedding invite with inserts featuring a pink and coral floral design

2 Eco friendly wedding invites made from recycled card

Choosing eco friendly wedding invites and stationery made from recycled card and paper is a great way to make your wedding more sustainable. Recycled paper and card uses less energy, water, and produces lower carbon emissions when it’s made than non-recycled paper. It also reduces the amount of waste to landfill. Did you know that paper can be recycled 4 to 5 times?2. Wherever possible, I print all of my wedding invites and stationery on recycled or sustainable paper or card. 

3 What happens to those eco friendly wedding invites & stationery after the big day?

So you’ve chosen recycled card and paper for your eco friendly wedding invites & stationery, great job. Have you thought about what happens to them afterwards? While I’d love to think that every single piece of stationery that I made is lovingly preserved in a memory box somewhere, in reality this just isn’t true. At some point that beautiful invite, menu or place card will end up in a bin. The best place for it would be a recycling bin so that the card or paper it’s made from can go on to be something else in it’s next life. A simple (but beautifully printed) flat invitation card with little or no embellishment is much more easily recyclable than a design that includes glitter, crystals and embellishments. 

floral concertina wedding invitation

4 Do you eco friendly wedding invites really need reply cards?

When you’re compiling all the info for those extra inserts to put into your invitations, think about whether you really need it or not. Is there another way? While you still want to send a beautifully printed invitation to your guests, could those extra details be put onto a website perhaps? And how about the reply cards? Maybe your guests respond to a phone number or email instead of having a printed card to send back? If you do have your heart set on a reply card, think about making it a postcard format, so that it doesn’t need an envelope to come back through the post. Every little helps, as they say.

Top tip – if you decide to ask your guests to respond by email, think about setting up a dedicated email address just for your wedding. You could even go one step further and create an auto reply with all the guest information.

personalised wedding menu with place card attached

5 Look for ‘double up’ items

Finally a tip that will not only help you save the planet, but could save you some cash too. Think about how some items of stationery can double up to do more than one thing. Here are my favourite examples:

Favour tags can be printed with your guests names so there’s no need for a separate place card

Want to give your guests biodegradable confetti for after the ceremony? How about a little glassine (recyclable!) bag with your order of the day timeline printed on the front.

Three sided table number columns (or table Toblerones as I have affectionately called them) include the table name or number, menu and a thank you note or message from you all in one.

Like the look of individual menus? How about a bookmark style, add their name to the top and a little thank you message to the bottom. Place card, menu & favour all in one, they add a little extra to your table decor too.

There are lots of ways you can make your wedding invites and stationery a little more eco friendly. That doesn’t mean you have to have it all made out of brown paper and string. Be mindful about exactly what you need to order. See if there are items that you can double up or leave out altogether. Choose recycled and easily recycled materials for your eco friendly wedding invites and stationery. Remember that it’s not about getting it 100% perfect. Taking steps in the right direction to make your wedding day a little more sustainable is a great start.

Enjoyed reading this post? Head over to my other blog all about why I’m committed to helping you make you big day more environmentally friendly.

Save my top 5 tips for eco friendly wedding invites for later – pin this image to your wedding board on Pinterest.

a graphic with the text eco friendly wedding invites - how to make your stationery more sustainable

Sources:
1 David Attenborough quote
2 Recycled paper and card facts & figures

Comments are closed.