GreenYour.com

Although wedding dresses made from natural fibers like hemp and organic cotton are an excellent choice for brides with green leanings, why not take it a step further and don a vintage dress? They require no new resources at all while breathe new life into a piece of coveted clothing that may have wound up in a landfill.

Find it! Vintage wedding dresses

Before you start in on the search for the vintage wedding dress of your dreams, ask women in your family if you can re-wear their gowns. Chances are, they'll be delighted to see their gowns make another memorable trip down the aisle. If these family hand-me-downs don't live up to your retro fantasies, dig through these fabulous vintage collections:

Buying a vintage wedding dress helps you go green because…

• When you buy new clothing, sustainable or not, there will be some attached environmental impact, whether it comes from the transport of hemp fiber from Romania to a manufacturer in Canada or from the pesticide-heavy treatment of conventional cotton. By purchasing a used article of clothing there are few, if any, environmental repercussions.
• When you buy used clothing it's no longer in a state of recycling limbo. Your purchase is the only fool-proof way to ensure that it doesn't eventually enter a landfill.

Choosing secondhand items—no matter what the item—means that no new resources or polluting chemicals are used to make new products. It also prevents products from ending up in landfills where they can leach chemicals into the soil and water.

Clothing is an excellent example of illustration of why it going to secondhand or vintage route is beneficial tgo the environment. Many garments are made in developing countries where environmental regulations are loose or nonexistent. Clothing can be made of petroleum-based synthetics, like nylon or polyester, or wood-based fabrics, like rayon and acetone, that eat up large amounts of water and chemicals during the extraction process. Additionally, the production of conventional cotton—a staple in the fashion industry—involves several serious environmental problems—overuse of chemicals and water being the two biggies—most of which the organic cotton industry is trying to solve.

By choosing secondhand clothes, no additional resources, chemicals, or pollutants are required to manufacture new items.

Additionally, each year nearly 9 billion pounds of textiles and clothing enter the public waste stream and are sent to landfills.[1] An estimated 10.6 million tons of textiles were generated in 2003, with the average American discarding about 68 pounds of clothing and textiles per year—85 percent of which ends up in landfills.[2] The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has shown that even state-of-the-art landfills, those with the latest technology for liners and operating methods, will eventually leak, releasing potentially hazardous chemicals from discarded items into the groundwater.[3] Although wedding dresses are considered a coveted item and generally aren't trashed after being worn, buying vintage ensures that a beauty, history-rich dress won't find its end in a landfill.

External links

• Portovert
• Time.com - The New Trend of Used
• Port Halcyon - Planning Your Vintage Wedding: Dressing the Bride
• About.com - Vintage Wedding Dresses: The Rules for Shopping for (and Finding!) a Vintage Wedding Dress