Ethical Weddings – Give Everyone Something To Celebrate
by Leonora Oppenheim, London, UK 
on 08.14.06
We’ve mentioned Katie Fewings’ new company Ethical Weddings a few times here and there on TreeHugger over the last few months in relation to other posts, and just yesterday in TH Blog Love. But we really think that Ethical Weddings deserves it’s own spotlight on TreeHugger. So here we go: As we've seen here on TH there are lots of different people providing eco-weddings services, whether it’s the dress, ring, confetti or even the cake, but things would be so much easier if all this information was based in one place. Katie, who also writes for City Hippy, says it was while planning her own wedding last year that she realised how much time, money and effort goes into planning weddings, how many choices and decisions there were to make. How helpful it would be, she thought, if there was a website which could save you time by pointing you in the right and ethical direction.
‘It made us think that if people are prepared to spend so much money on one day, why not spend it where it can do some good, with fair trade, organic and local products and services, knowing the provenance and the people involved, and at least where it will not harm: avoiding conflict diamonds, hothouse flowers saturated with chemicals, and dresses which could be the product of sweatshop labour. We trawled the Internet for organic and fair trade caterers, dressmakers using fair trade and organic fabrics, recycled stationery and fair trade wine. Once you begin to consider the different elements that make up a wedding, the possibilities for going ethical are endless - and sometimes overwhelming. After many hours of searching we thought how great it would be to have everything in one place. All these suppliers and service providers listed regionally, according to the service or product, or budget. And this is why we have set up ethicalweddings.com.’
The Ethical Weddings website is designed and hosted by the green hosting company Make Hay and you can find all sorts of tips and information on there about how to green your wedding day. As we mentioned Katie has also just started an Ethical Weddings Blog to keep people up to date on the latest ways to tie the knot in an eco-friendly way. ::Ethical Weddings
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Hi,
An option for organic cotton, hemp/silk, and 100% silk wedding dresses is from Olivia Luca. www.OliviaLuca.com On our web site you can use our fun interactive tool to design your own dress and choose the fabric.
We are dedicated to finding as many sustainable options for fabrics as possible that work with our designs and add them to the site as they become available.
Our business practices come from a sustainable point of view. All of our shipments in and out are offset with the purchase of Green Tags. We strongly encourage alternative modes to transportation and alternative energy. We donate all of our fabric scraps to a local non-profit low-income artists guild who reuses them to make additional items. These among other everyday things like the three R's help us towards our goals of being a sustainable business.
All of our garments are sewn in Portland, Oregon in our own bright and cheery studio, no long hours bent over sewing machines overseas!
The real problem currently is the limited choice of responsible fabric options. While there are lots of knits out there, there are few woven fabrics that are easily available to small companies and applicable to wedding and party dresses. We are in hot pursuit of them and will be adding them as them to our options as they become available.
You can also check out Portvert.com for additional sustainable wedding ideas and resources, and Harmony Art for fabrics, she has links to other fabric options on her site.
Cheers,
Terri Spaeth-Merrick
Olivia Luca
www.olivialuca.com
Portland, Oregon