A Guide to a Zero Waste Wedding & Nearly Zero Cleanup
Making memories without having stuff or waste.
All the little details of wedding décor adds up in stuff to breakdown, and stuff that’ll be accumulated afterwards at your house or in storage. The venue that you choose might provide breakdown for you, but many times, the extra wedding decor that you decided to rent or buy, need to get secured and taken after the party’s over. Nothing’s more of a buzzkill than having a bunch of stuff to breakdown, and a bunch of stuff that you’ll have stacked up at your house collecting dust.
Our mission was to stay on budget, choose wedding décor that would be minimal breakdown, and pieces that wouldn’t get wasted.
My husband and I have done our fair share of events having to set up and breakdown, then pack in storage and organize. It works, but it’s also a workout, and since this is a one-time event, we didn’t really want to have wedding stuff used once and then taking up space at our place.
If we found any wedding decor items that we liked, it’d have to meet some criteria:
Can it be reused?
Will it be reused? Meaning, is someone or somebody going to be claiming them afterwards?
Will it be easy to breakdown?
Will we have a vendor or someone to set it up and break it down?
Is it going to end up with us? If yes, repeat answering the first two questions.
We also were going to be moving in together and didn’t really the space for extra storage. Saying all this, of course we wanted a beautiful wedding, and have it be our dream vision. Our wedding was outside near the water on the North Shore of O’ahu, so we took advantage of basically using that as our main decor. Not a lot of things better than that. The setting was already beautiful so we wanted essential items to make it our look. Here’s the top five essentials and a list it all below to help you get to a zero waste and zero cleanup wedding.
Utilizing the Venue
Build a relationship with the venue that makes it happen and think about being a blessing to them. Zero waste can be impactful for your venue too.
We discussed what the venue already had and what would be available for us to use. This was a priority before we started searching out things that were possibly unnecessary. For instance, Hale‘iwa Joe’s already had two white tents, dining wear, glass wear, long wooden tables and chairs for the lanai area, and outdoor outlets, storage container, and freezer storage.
From there, we went through them to bring in vendors for an additional white tent, tables, chairs, and outdoor sound setup. All of those things would be able to get set up and broken down by the venue or the vendors.
We also built a relationship with our venue and loved hearing how we were their first wedding since COVID, and how they wanted to book more weddings and formal events. They do a lot of surf gatherings throughout the year, being on the North Shore, but they wanted to get back to doing formal events again. This is something we kept in mind as we wanted to bless them for all their help in supporting us throughout the process.
We donated…
We talked to the venue manager about any interest in our wedding decor after our wedding to have for in their inventory for future wedding bookings. They were very interested and wanted buy it from us, but we wanted to bless them. We donated our white table linens (these were surprisingly hard to come by in Hawaii), acrylic table signs and stands, awning setup, and floral table runners.
Etsy shop CoppiceAndCrafts
Sun shade from Amazon and cables and carabiners from Home Depot. Photo by Toby Grado
Acrylic table sign stand from Etsy shop CoppiceAndCrafts Table linen from Amazon.
Photo by Toby Grado
Invitations
No paper, no waste, saved postage, and used Joy.
Paper invites are beautiful but also can amount to a lot with inserts and envelopes. Plus, most people toss them at some point. We instead used a free platform — Joy. We were able to create a wedding site that was accessed by our guests via email or SMS, add our registry, and more. It was a one stop shop for invitations and all updates for our guests, along with keeping track of things for us on the backend as the admin. All things RSVPs, addresses, registry, thank you’s, and exporting to excel sheets. As a project manager, I very much appreciated how it streamlined that for us. No waste and all of the excel sheets I was able to include into my own personal Master Planning Grid (if you’re planning to DIY your wedding check out my post for a place to start with all my planning tools) and immediate communication received and sent to all our guests or select groups.
Florals
Choose locally grown flowers, support a farmer, and use reusable materials to DIY.
Photo by Toby Grado
A friend found out we were looking for proteas and asked their aunty and uncle who have a protea farm on Maui. They only do wholesale, but decided to do our wedding as a favor. Not only that, but my husband’s uncle had a good season of king proteas which he graciously provided as well. Thankfully, we were able to have our dream florals for our wedding!
We also looked through DIY arrangement articles and tutorials and did not want to use foam or materials that are wasteful either. They also seemed very messy to work with too. We tried a bunch of mockups. Definitely do this at least a month in advance because it takes a lot of finesse to execute what you have in mind in floral form. It was an undertaking but they came out beautiful! We used driftwood from the beach and leftover recycled copper wire from my husband’s electrical jobs. Shoutout to our friends who helped us make these beauties come to life!
Our driftwood pieces were already being claimed by guests before we even got to our reception, which is what we wanted.
Audio Guestbook
We passed on having a traditional guestbook and found a keepsake.
For us, we didn’t want a guestbook that collected dust, or something that also created a long line for guests instead of enjoying themselves at our wedding. We found an audio guestbook company, Vintage Voicemails. They restore vintage rotary phones that your guests can use to leave a voice message! It made it fun for all of our guests and even more special when we got the audio file. It was also such a special way to be able to reminisce about our day once we got our voicemail sent to us. You’ll love opening this with your partner!
There are other businesses that provide a similar service, but they had the best end to end service and ease in terms of booking, setup, ease of use for guests, and also getting your voicemail to you. It was a bit of a splurge in relation to our budget, but we went for it and didn’t regret it.
Signage
It was the DIY bestie trio — Etsy, Home Depot, and Canva on recycled paper that helped us get it done.
Etsy shop CourierCanvas photographed by Toby Grado
Linen signs meant that we could reuse our wedding signs for beach days and picnics. We found an Etsy shop and sent them our designs to print.
The stands my husband built. I was finding that online the copper stands I wanted to hold were kind of pricey and my husband knew exactly how to build them for more than half of the cost. He got the pipes from Home Depot, cut them to size and assembled them. Afterwards. the sign stands were able to get recycled.
Banner from Nordstrom Rack photographed by Toby Grado
Table Signs & Stands
Etsy shop CourierCanvas photographed by Toby Grado
We used Etsy and customized the design for each table sign but kept it general enough to where we could donate them to our venue afterwards.
Name Placements
Etsy shop TheWeddingIssues photographed by Toby Grado
These were made of wood and engraved by a shop on Etsy. It feels thoughtful when you get to an event and see your name placed at the table. We also wanted our guests to be able to take it as a gift.
Seating & Check-In
There’s so many cool ways of letting your guests know where they sit. Everything from a champagne wall to a custom acrylic board with beautiful calligraphy. They are stunning pieces that we’ve admired being at weddings where they’ve been used. But we had to think creatively to avoid accumulating stuff and stuff that would need to be packed up.
What about a smiling face greeting you to welcome you in with your seats, answer questions, and make sure you get a glass of champagne?
Photographed by Toby Grado
So we thought of a few friends who would be perfect for the task and willing to help. We exported the guests lists from our wedding website through Joy, and our friends were able to welcome everyone to their tables. They were rockstars! Our guests loved being greeted by them, and having someone to welcome them in with “all the things” instead of roaming to navigate those things on their own.
Photographed by Toby Grado
Our cards and gifts we used a wooden crate from my husband’s farming business and a white mailbox. The mailbox is a sentiment to reuse one day, being the home that we buy.
Thank You Cards
Yes, even the thank you cards were accounted for. Being wasteful is one of my husband’s biggest pet peeves.
Etsy shop PaperedJune
Etsy for the win again! I found a shop seeds. Once you’re done with the card, you can plant it to grow wildflowers.