Green Weddings

The trend toward making your wedding as "green" as possible has really been a hot item on the coasts, but like everything else, it takes a while for it to make it to the Midwest. Nevertheless, I think we all need to start thinking about how we can green up our events. Yes, it's one day in our lives that we shouldn't have to think about the environment, but it's also one day in our lives when the attention is on us and we are able to make a statement about our values and beliefs. If your 250 guests see that you are concerned enough about the environment to green up your wedding day, think about how that will impact their thoughts and more importantly, their actions?
I came across a very interesting article the other day about how to green up your wedding. The wedding article was a link from the website www.greenlivingideas.com which had lots of ideas for things to do to reduce, reuse and recycle. I really enjoyed looking through it. The article on weddings was particularly interesting to me though, of course. I hadn't thought about the fact that having your wedding and reception at one location (like you can do here at Aberdeen Manor!) was a "green" thing to do! It saves on fuel to get from one location to another for all of those guests! Cool! Click the link above and read all their great ideas, and see what you can apply to your wedding. Many of them were very painless.
Aberdeen Manor has tried for many years to do what we could for the environmental effort. When we got a recycling bin two years ago, we had one 2 yard for recycling and two 2 yard bins for garbage. We soon found that we had to go to 2 of the recycling bins and one for garbage! Our staff has done an exemplary job of separating recyclable items from the garbage and making sure that they get to the right bin. We also recycle electronics through drop off to the city's facility, batteries are dropped off at Best Buy, right inside the door to the store, and plastic bags are taken to Wal-mart. Our biggest issue is organic, clean, food waste. Solutions for a facility that handles the amount of food waste we have are not cheap though. I haven't found anything that could handle the quantities we have for less than 10,000 dollars. That's a lot of ching! We can't just buy the jumbo compost bin from AM Leonard for 300 dollars! I think our best bet is to partner with other businesses that might have a need for composting or recycling. We have several woodshops in the area that we could partner with to dispose of their clean sawdust, and mixing this with our organic waste would help to dilute it since you can't put more than 10% meat scraps in the composter. We also have Creme de la Crop on Highway 30 that is an organic farm and would be able to use our delicious compost for their fields. Perhaps Trio Restaurant in Aberdeen would be interested in working with us, and adding their waste to the mix. Landscapers might be interested in our clean delicious compost for their gardens and yards that they maintain. There are so many possibilities.
We have been changing our lightbulbs over to CFL's as much as possible, and we are looking into the possibility of motion sensors for our lights, and water conserving faucets for our sinks. A business like ours uses lots of water, for dishwashing, handwashing, etc. so any way we can cut water usage would be a plus. There are even CO2 sensing devices for thermostats that automatically adjust the temperature in a room when someone is in it or not in it (because all of us bodies breath out CO2, you know) We have programmable thermostats that we try to keep up with as much as possible. The beauty of conserving power, water, and fuel, is that it saves us cost for our utilities! This works great in our homes, and is even better in a business!
All of us at Aberdeen Manor are committed to making reduce/reuse/recycle our way of life and our focus in anything we do in our business and in our homes. As we come across other ways of conserving our natural resources as well as electricity, fossil fuels, and water, we'll let you in on it!
So keep us in mind when you are planning your "green" wedding!