Go Green with Wedding Photos

Wedding is the time when everyone makes one of the biggest commitments of their lifetime. But even as you make the commitment to your spouse, make a commitment to nature and go green!

When you plan a green wedding, you can print eco-friendly invitation cards, arrange for eco-friendly decorations and even wear eco-friendly dresses. But it would be incomplete without using a green way to save your wedding memories; you wedding photos.

These days wedding photos are typically shot on digital cameras and there is no chemical processing until you print them. So taking digital photos is almost eco-friendly to begin with. But there are a few things you can do to make it fully eco-friendly. Here are some tips to go green with eco-friendly wedding photos.

• Store the bulk of you digital photos on your computer. Print only a select few. This is easy to do but impact on the environment is big for it will take less paper and fewer trees.

• When you backup your digital photos in CDs or DVDs, use eco-friendly inks for labeling and use recycled plastic or bio-plastic cases to store them. Bio-plastics come from renewable materials like corn or starch and look like conventional plastic.

• Have your digital photos printed on recycled paper. Recycled paper comes from two sources - one is from industrial waste materials which do not go through consumer utilization. The other comes from waste materials that have completed their life cycle as a consumer item and are no longer useful in their existing form. Labeled as post-consumer recycled paper, it is truly eco-friendly as it a reuse of post-consumption waste like paper, cardboard, etc. collected from residential or commercial recycling programs.

• Use recyclable ink cartridges to print your photos. ConeColor is a brand that sells ink cartridges that can be reused for a lifetime. Cartridges use semiconductor chips that are made using toxic materials like arsenic, cadmium and lead. Using eco-friendly cartridges can prevent these materials from going into landfills.

• You can put your printed eco-friendly wedding photos in an album made with recycled materials like paper and plastic or natural fibers like silk, cotton, hemp, etc.

• For the wedding photos you plan to frame, buy frames made of recycled paper or wood.

Many specialty stores sell eco-friendly photo accessories. Try Sunpack, Touch of Handmade World , Photo Paper Direct for some photo ideas. The recycled materials are very durable, affordable and they come is a wide range of colors and designs. So you do not have to compromise style or utility when you save your eco-friendly wedding photos. Remember to look for the '100% recycled' label when you shop for your green wedding photo accessories.