UTRECHT, Netherlands (AFP) — “Within like 30 minutes I knew this was the one,” Lara Peters said of the second-hand wedding dress she had just worn to her marriage — in the Netherlands’ busiest rail station.
Peters, 42, had found the dress two days earlier in a shop run by “Free Fashion,” a Dutch foundation devoted to recycling clothing to combat waste — a cause close to her heart.
That is why she and her 44-year-old husband Mathijs Dordregter chose sustainability as the theme of their wedding — with the help of Free Fashion.
The organization says it is the kind of trend people everywhere will need to adopt if humankind wants to curb over-consumption and its destructive effect on the planet.
“The message that during your wedding you can also choose sustainable options is very important to me,” the bride explained.
Peters works in communications in the sustainable development field, so the couple’s choice to hold their wedding ceremony in the bustle of Utrecht rail station had a certain logic to it.
Nina Reimert of the Free Fashion foundation helped organize the event.
“We know that in terms of emissions... producing a wedding dress is similar to something like 250 kilometers by car,” she told Agence France-Presse.
“And they’re made of all different materials so they are really hard to recycle and almost everything is polyester,” she added.
With 17,000 weddings a year in the Netherlands, she explained, that adds up to a lot of emissions. “It’s a nightmare.”
It was to draw attention to the over-consumption inherent in many weddings that the Free Fashion foundation decided to make an online appeal to convince couples to approach the happy day from a different perspective.