April 22, 2022

Happy Earth Day!

We couldn’t imagine a better way to wrap up our year long “Green Practices” blog series on EARTH DAY than to summarize how us, as wedding planners, are eco-friendly and strike towards being a green company. Most often, your planner is the first vendor that you secure before diving into planning all the little details. We often guide our couples to make conscious decisions on everything from venue, catering, floral and decor. Ohana Events is proud to be green and have the ability to help our couples reduce, reuse & recycle in ways they didn’t think about before.

Our goal is that every one of our couples consciously makes THREE decisions based on helping the environment. Here are some easy recommendations to getting YOU there:

• Hire a vendor that is part of the Green Wedding Alliance (or anyone who is actively eco-friendly) INSTEAD of another vendor who is not. Making the decision due to the fact that they’re eco-friendly is what we would count towards the 3 eco-friendly decisions
• Use recycled paper or homemade for any paper goods vs. traditional card stock. And/or, consider electronic invitations through GreenVelope or Paperless Post.
• If you want to provide favors or ceremony programs, do NOT print them at full guest count. Most times, not every person grabs a program or remembers to bring a favor home. We see a lot of waste in both of these categories so purchase these two items for roughly 60-70% of the guest count. For favors, do not put at each place setting (or you need to invest in the full guest count). Place these on a table for when guests leave the wedding.
• If you haven’t finalized the locations of your various wedding “events” yet, please be mindful of the distance between each space. For example, we recommend having your rehearsal dinner be close to your main hotel block so it’s walking distance, which results in less transportation. We are HUGE fans of when ceremonies are on-site (vs. at a second location) because that eliminates a lot of transportation
• Invest in shuttles! While transportation is our least favorite vendor to deal with, at least it helps the environment by getting guests to/from locations in one vehicle. Imagine all the pollution for one wedding to call 20 Ubers
• Hire a compost service such as the Urban Canopy! And/or consider donating your flowers after your wedding so they get repurposed instead of thrown out!
• Add a registry option that is non-tangible. So instead of 100 gifts being sent from various locations with lots of packaging and waste, you can opt to do Honeymoon Funds or even a Cash Fund (through various sites) which eliminate a ton of waste.
• Repurpose items that you were not originally planning to. For example, you can use one frame for two signs, but you can ask your wedding planner to switch out the sign when the time is right (start with a welcome sign, transform that to a menu sign or timeline sign). You can also find a way to repurpose all florals. Whether that’s your florist who moves ceremony floral to another location or even your planner who can move cocktail hour arrangements to the dessert table, the options are endless in this category.
• Do you want a fun “grand exit” photo op? Instead of using sparklers, consider using biodegradable confetti. We had one couple collect an dry flowers every time they received a bouquet or nice flower centerpiece and they used these flowers to throw after the ceremony. It was meaningful and eco-friendly!
• If you’re considering a buffet dinner, please think about what you’re committing to. We appreciate plated meals where every ounce of food is pre-determined so there are not chaffers with pounds and pounds of unused food which is thrown out right after the event. In addition to the wasted food, buffets require sternos which are not good for the environment. Also, you will be bringing in a lot more rentals for the buffet line which is not as efficient as plated meals.
• Ask your caterer and florist to source their flowers and produce from local farms. If you hire a eco-friendly caterer/florist, this may be part of their practice. But if they’re not, you are allowed to put in recommendations as such to strive towards being green.

Ohana Events has been part of the Green Wedding Alliance for 2 years now. Since the time of joining, we have continued to educate ourselves on how we can continue to better our sustainability and help instill it in our clients as well. Take a look at some of ways that we, as event planners, practice being green:

Rentals

Renting items is an easy solution to reduce waste. Ohana has a list of rental items that are available for our couples to rent. By having items like card boxes, table numbers, and frames in our inventory, our couples can choose to use those items rather than purchase their own. When couples purchase misc. items for a wedding day, most of these decor items end up getting thrown out, or tucked in storage, never to be seen again!

Online Contracts

Paper is out! For a long time there wasn’t a better solution than mailing a hard copy contract to our couples. We’re excited to now say that all of our contracts are 100% done online (electronic signatures required through the Adobe platform) and we also encourage online payments as well.

Google Drive Organization

While we hate to admit it, we when owner of Ohana Events, Danielle, started in the planning industry, she was taught by another company who printed every single contract and final planning document for every wedding. They were stored in binders which were brought on-site to every event. It was one of those “what in the heck are we doing” moments when we realized how absolutely insane it was to be printing all of this when we can organize everything online through Google Drive. Not only does it save paper, it helps organize EVERYTHING wedding related for our couples as well. More info on wedding-day organization next…

iPad Friendly

To further eliminate paper waste, our team uses iPad’s on the day of rather than printed timelines. By working through a google drive specifically formatted to each couple’s wedding, we don’t have to worry about printing copies because it is all in one place. We can also communicate to one another via iPad messages which is a nice and professional way to communicate on wedding day. We are also happy to provide our iPads for ceremony readings if a reader forgot to bring their script. An iPad looks much more classy than using a cell phone.

Attend Green Events

Check out the GWA site for future events so you can add them to your calendar. One event is called the Recyclery – which happens twice a year! This event is a garage sale full of wedding related items like votives, dresses, glassware, aisle decor, centerpieces, card boxes, signage, & more! You can sign up and purchase any used wedding items for a fraction of the cost. And if you have wedding items you want to throw away, please don’t! Consider donating to the Green Wedding Alliance so we can repurpose and sell to those that want to be eco-friendly (or just save money)! Another event is called Committed which is the only Chicago “green wedding show” that showcases all eco-friendly vendors under one roof. You can meet green vendors and learn about their practices, all while sipping tasty drinks and eating yummy snacks. Fun fact, there is always a raffle of some sort!

Recommendations

We don’t want to say this is one of the most important things BUT it’s one of our practices that results in the biggest sustainable move in the end. Being a part of the GWA has allowed us to connect with various vendors who proactively work to be green as well. We always recommend other green-forward vendors to our couples whether it is a priority to them or not. By acknowledging what another vendor does, it helps keeps the conversation of being green relevant, and hopefully allows our couples to ask, “in what other ways can we be sustainable?”. Referring back to the fact that we’ve become SO much more educated in being sustainable just by the vendors we associate with.

Eliminating Waste

On wedding day, there are many decisions that get made. Are you having programs? Do you want to have favors? Did you want to print menus? These are all questions can either increase or decrease your waste tremendously. If favors are a must, have you considered sustainable packaging? Eliminate your waste by never having programs printed to full guest count. As your planner, we are here to talk through all the pros & cons of decisions based off of what we know. You may absolutely hate everything we have to say which is totally fine, but then at least we know that we gave all the possible options and you chose what worked best for YOU!

Ohana Event’s Photo Booth

We are so excited to share that we have a photo booth available to rent! Our photo booth sends photos directly from our booth to the user’s cell phones or email addresses. We do have the option to print but we don’t advertise that as heavily, as it’s not an eco-friendly practice. But besides just being compatible with online sending (of photos, GIFs, boomerangs, videos, etc.), by using one less vendor on wedding day, that eliminates one less car traveling to the job which is also better for the environment.

Thank you to everyone who followed along with our Green Wedding Alliance series! We hope that we were able to make a positive impact on your outlook on sustainability. As a team, Ohana Events, we continue to learn about new ways that we can be more eco-friendly as a whole and we hope you do too!

– Ohana Events