Step by Step Guide to Greening a Traditional Registry

Looking to give your registry a green hue?  Great decision!  Here are the steps we developed from our experiance greening our registry.

1.       Take stock of what you need. Books like The Wedding Book: The Big Book for Your Big Day or stores like Williams Sonoma offer a great checklist of a typical registry.  We were able to go through the list and decide what we did and didn’t need.

2.       Evaluate your options.  We are dedicated to not only going for the green option but also to supporting small, local businesses. We investigated our local retail options and online resources.  We included traditional retail outlets in our survey and were pleasantly surprised to find many are now offering green product lines.

3.       Set and order your priorities:  Style, price, durability, usability, level of green, and sourcing were all important to us but we were not aligned on the order of priority.  Mandy set green above all others while Sean brought the more practical issues like durability and usability. For example, Mandy fell in love with a recycled glass artisan dish set for their everyday wear. It didn’t make the registry because it was not microwaveable.  We found another recycled glass set through Vivaterra that was.

4.       Test your products before committing to them:   Many of the green products are only available online.  It was important to us to ensure that the products lived up to their marketing.  For example, we bought samples of several styles of bath towels before committing to one. We wanted to see what held its color and we enjoyed the most. Similarly, we bought a couple samples of our everyday wear to test it out.

5.       Register at multiple places:  We were not able to find a way to aggregate our registry in one place. 

6.       Explain to your guests what you’re doing and why you are doing it:  The registry is a wonderful way for your guests to take part in your adventure.  You can expose them to fun, new resources that they will hopefully use beyond your wedding.  Consider taking time to explain to your guests why you chose the products and retailers. 

7.       Reduce and recycle the packaging material: 

a.       Reduce:  We eliminated wasteful shipping by arranging to have our local retailers hold our gifts so that we could pick up them up at one time. This also allowed us to cut out packaging materials. 

b.      Recycle:  We recycled the cardboard and other paper packing materials with our regular recycling.  We returned the packing peanuts to our local UPS store.

c.       Compost:  Tissue paper and wax coated paper are great additives to your compost pile.