Couple say 'I do' to green wedding
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If you love her, you should give her a big fat wedding.
That's what almost every groom would be told if marrying a Chinese bride. But 31-year-old clean-development professional Guan Yisong's wedding, to be held later this month, put him in the middle of a dilemma.
Guan deals with carbon emission reduction at work almost every day, so he hated the idea that his own wedding would generate a lot of emissions. "But I would not allow myself to not give my girl a wedding; it is once-in-a-lifetime thing and I wanted to make it special," said Guan, co-founder the of Easy Carbon Consultancy Co Ltd, which he said is one of China's top five consulting firms in the field.
Guan's 27-year-old bride, Xu Wei, is a graduate of environment studies and formerly worked in the clean-development division of the National Development and Reform Commission.
Both of them have broad experience with emissions-offset projects, so they wanted to apply this approach to their wedding.
To make their wedding as green as possible, the couple will hold their wedding in a hotel next to a subway station in downtown Beijing. They also dropped the idea of renting a limousine as their wedding car.
But they ruled out other compromises: They need to have fun, to have a flashing chandelier, to order champagnes shipped from abroad and to have as many friends at the wedding as possible - even if they will fly to the wedding or drive a car.
To neutralize carbon emissions from the wedding, Guan will first calculate the volume of greenhouse gases created. "Basically we found out how guests were traveling to the wedding - by car, metro or bus. We also factored in the electricity used at the wedding, especially in the lighting and audio-visual effect, and the emissions created from food preparation."
At their banquet reception desk, guests will report their means of transportation and their travel distance - guests' transportation is the biggest contributor to the wedding's carbon footprint, he said.
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