The Sustainable Wedding Alliance have released their first impact report, covering the first two years of driving sustainable change in the wedding industry.
As a business that is working towards becoming certified B Corp, the Sustainable Wedding Alliance strives to balance business success with social and environmental sustainability. They value transparency, integrity and collaboration, and empower the wedding industry to embrace sustainability and integrate it into their daily business practices. It’s clear that they are committed to these values which are reflected in their first impact report.
Founder, Michelle Miles said: “It’s important to us that we have an impact beyond our own business, the Sustainable Wedding Alliance was created to drive sustainable change, to empower the industry and communities to build knowledge and confidence so that we can thrive. Sustainability isn’t just a check box, it’s a way of working, we are all continually learning and improving, no one is perfect.”
The impact report includes sections on ethical finance, marketing and shared responsibility. It reports on their carbon footprint for 2021 and 2022, and what actions they’ve taken to become carbon neutral. It also includes their commitment to reduce waste to landfill and celebrates reaching their zero waste target in 2022, and their focus is on inspiring and educating businesses we work with to also remove single use plastic from their operations.
The Sustainable Wedding Alliance exists to drive positive change
After several years in development the Sustainable Wedding Alliance was incorporated in December 2020, they then launched their website in March 2021, ran an industry wide survey in April and hosted the first Sustainable Wedding Summit in May 2022. Following that, they invited the wedding industry to join the Alliance and become a member. Since then they’ve grown their membership, designed an industry accreditation, continued asking the industry, and couples about sustainability and launched the Sustainable Wedding Awards.
The Sustainable Wedding Alliance was founded by Michelle Miles, who has twenty years experience in the events and wedding industry.
“I started the Sustainable Wedding Alliance in response to the number of businesses I was working with in the wedding industry that wanted to become more sustainable but just didn’t know where to start. I’d been working on the idea of creating a community, a place that people that shared the same ethos could come together over a shared interest in making the wedding industry more sustainable. Despite 2020 being a difficult year, I used the downtime to develop the Alliance. It was clear to me that there was a need for a place that people could come together, learn about how they could make their businesses more sustainable, share their experiences and help each other.”
“I’m so proud of everything we have achieved in the last two years. It’s been such a privilege to work alongside so many wonderful businesses, helping them to implement sustainable strategies that will enable their business to grow in a way that places sustainability at the heart of what they do.”
The Alliance has been growing in membership steadily over the last two years, with more and more businesses in the industry wanting to work more sustainably, alongside couple demand building, it’s clear that the Sustainable Wedding Alliance is having an impact far beyond it’s own business.
See the full report here: Sustainable Wedding Alliance 2020-2022 Impact Report
