GWG logo

GWG logo
We are the GRAND PRIZE winners!

Sunday, April 10, 2011

GWG Grand Prize - thank you!!!

Happy couple!
We are incredibly grateful and honored to have been named the Grand Prize winners of the Green Wedding Giveaway 2011!  What an incredible journey this has been.  Before we move on to the actual wedding planning details, we first want to send a special thank you to everyone involved with the contest, first and foremost, Clay Hill Farm for hosting this amazing opportunity. Running through the list of prizes that we and our fellow finalists are receiving, we are amazed by how many members of the Southern Maine community have pitched in to make this contest as incredible and rewarding as it is.  Thank you ALL so much for your generosity, and for making our wedding so special.  We can't forget the judges!  You donated so much of your time and energy reviewing all the contest submittal material, and we thank you for believing in our green message.  Of course, thank you to everyone who went online to vote, and especially our friends and family who encouraged others to vote!  Thank you to Pace Law School for allowing us to host our event on your campus.  Last but certainly NOT least, thank you to our friends who helped us pull our give-back event together and act as creative resources throughout the process - you know who you are, we love you, and we can't thank you enough.

Jeff, Samantha, Luke, and Cassi: you did an AMAZING job in your campaigns, and we were so honored to be named among you as finalists.  After working so hard for four weeks toward a common goal, watching and reading your blogs, we feel quite a bit of camaraderie with you all.  Everyone took a unique approach, celebrating their specific shade of green, and the cumulative impact of all our efforts is certainly going to have a lasting impression - we should all be very proud of what we accomplished.  Now we're super excited to follow everyone's wedding journeys over the next few months, and hope we can exchange ideas, too!

It's impossible for us to describe in words what this whole experience means to us... perhaps when we calm down a bit we'll be more articulate.  The cliche "dream come true" doesn't do the feeling justice.  We've met some inspiring people along the way, learned a lot about ourselves, our green ambitions, and how to work together as a couple, all thanks to the Green Wedding Giveaway.  On top of all that, we've won our dream wedding!

We are heading back to NY in the morning, but cannot wait to return to Maine to continue this green wedding adventure.  July 10th is going to be a beautiful day, we are so excited to share it with our friends and family.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Green Wedding Planning (Part II)

Here’s the second round of our green wedding planning ideas.  The more research we do, the more creative ideas we find that we hope to incorporate.  There are so many great resources out there!


Flowers
ProblemThe flower industry imports many exotic flowers for special events, such as weddings.  The chemicals (fertilizers and pesticides) used to grow flower crops can be terrible for the environment, and our health.
SolutionFind a florist near your venue that can supply you with local, seasonal, and organically grown flowers for your celebration.  Using local flowers will further reduce the carbon footprint of the wedding, and again, support local businesses (we also read that the cost may be one third or one half that of flowers coming from overseas – wow!).  Only place organic flowers as decorations on your cake – you don’t want to be eating those toxic pesticides!  Another option: forego cut flowers in your centerpieces and instead provide live plants for local guests to take home and plant.

Attire
ProblemBridal gown fabrics are often made with bleach and non-organic materials, while tuxedos are cleaned with harsh, environmentally toxic chemicals by the dry-cleaning industry.
SolutionThere are many options for the stylish bride and groom who care about the planet.  For the bride, try going vintage and buy or borrow a recycled dress.  If you want a dress that’s all your own, choose an eco-friendly designer that makes dresses with natural fabrics and dyes (think cotton and hemp).  After the wedding, you can select an eco-friendly dry-cleaner to preserve your dress, or sell or donate your dress to a charity so that it gets more than one use.  For the groom, have him choose a suit or tuxedo made from natural materials, preferably one already in his closet, borrowed, or rented.  If renting, find a rental place that uses eco-friendly dry cleaning.  Another option is to ask your bridesmaids to pick out one of their favorite dresses from their existing wardrobes and see if you can pull together a fun and whimsical color palette.

Jewelry
ProblemYou’re probably aware of the human rights issues stemming from the diamond industry (if not, the movie Blood Diamond is an entertaining way to learn more), but the mining of our precious metals and stones contributes to a staggering amount of pollution as well.
SolutionFind a jeweler that makes wedding rings from recycled materials or give a facelift to a family heirloom.  Be sure to talk to your jeweler about conflict-free stones for your rings. (Try this or this to start)

That pesky carbon footprint
ProblemAs we wrote last time, our guest list is highly international, and therefore our carbon footprint is… not small.  Yes, we feel guilty about this, but the people we love are scattered across the globe!
SolutionSince teleportation has still not been invented, we’ll be offsetting the air travel of our guests with carbon credits.  Amy did a quick estimate of our emissions based on the number of people we *think* will join us on our special day and the cities they’ll be traveling from (used an emission calculator provided by Terrapass).  Our guests will travel thousands of miles to and from our wedding on airplanes, amounting to over 73 metric tons of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent).  There are other sources of greenhouse gas emissions associated with the wedding, but airplane travel is by far the largest contributor to our wedding carbon footprint, not to mention the easiest to quantify.

We still have more green wedding ideas!
What are yours?

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Environmental Awareness School Presentation

If you’ve been following the GWG contest blog, you may have read that we had plans to give an environmental awareness presentation to a 3rd grade classroom last week.  Unfortunately, we were told a couple of days before that we could not publicize the event for the purposes of the contest (winning a wedding is perceived as monetary gain, and a conflict for the school).  HUGE bummer, for us and for the students.  We’re done whining about the disappointment and want to make our presentation available to whoever might find it useful out there.  We designed it with a 3rd grade, urban school audience in mind, but it could be tailored to fit a wider range of ages with a little tweaking.  If you know any teachers who are looking for things to do in their classroom as part of Earth Day, perhaps share this blog post with them.

We have never developed a lesson plan before and found this to be a lot of work (teachers – we have so much RESPECT for you all; thank you for everything you do).  It was fun to think about how to teach kids, to really get through to them about the importance of the environment.  Amy grew up in a fairly rural area of Maine, and Douglas grew up in a major city; our perspectives on the environment were quite different as children.  However, we realized when making this presentation that it was our connectedness with nature that eventually led us to the career paths we chose, doing our best to protect the planet.  We hope by sharing this, a few teachers will use this in their schools, and maybe, just maybe, we will awaken the environmental spirit within a few kids.  Let’s see!

Click here to access the power point presentation, and let us know if you plan to use it (we don't want credit, just nice to know if it gets used).

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Community Give-Back Event at Pace Law School (March 31, 2011)

It’s been a VERY busy week, organizing our community give-back event, so we haven’t been able to update the blog recently.  Hopefully you forgive us  ;-)

This past Thursday (March 31) we held our community giveback event at Pace Law School.  It was nice to share our ideas on green living, and seemed to make an impact on the people who attended.  We’ve described the event on the GWG blog website, but we want to share some photos and video clips from the event so you have an idea of what we talked about.  At the end of this post we’re providing links to the info sheets that we provided to the audience, which contains more information on the topics we discussed.

The audience grabs snacks and chats before we gave our talk.
Faculty, staff, and students all came to the event!
In this clip, we’re describing our experience with the GWG contest and the reason we came to Pace Law School for our give-back event (thank you, Pace, for hosting us).

Next, we talk about the dangers of plastic bags, and why it’s important that we reduce our consumption by bringing reusable bags when we go shopping.

Then we moved on to eco-friendly shopping tips…

We’re big fans of DIY cleaning products after our seminar at Stone Barns with Alexandra Zissu.  Better for your health and the environment!

Our dependence on fossil fuels to produce energy is a growing concern with every passing day, contributing to climate change.  There are some easy ways to reduce your consumption.

Freshwater is limited and it takes energy to get to our homes, so we are doing what we can to use less water in our home.

Last but not least, we wanted to talk about electronic recycling.  It seems like every day a new, cool and exciting electronic gadget hits the market, rendering older devices outdated or obsolete.  But what happens to those old devices?

At the end of our event we raffled off a GREEN prize to one lucky audience member!

For more information about the topics we discussed during the event, we’re providing the info sheets we prepared for the audience.  Of course, the information here is not nearly exhaustive – we encourage everyone to do research on their own and learn what more they can do to help our planet.  We all need to do our part, but the cumulative impact of all our small actions can be huge!

Resources: