If your church or place of worship is regularly used for wedding ceremonies, you’ll know that the first thing people want to do when the couple leave the building, is shower them with confetti! It’s an age old tradition but did you know that some types of confetti can be harmful to the environment?
Why do we throw confetti?
The throwing of confetti at weddings began in Italy over 2 centuries ago. The word confetti actually translates from Italian as ‘sweets’ and during this time, imitation sweets were made out of plaster and thrown over married couples along with flowers, petals, grains and rice. This mimicked the sowing of seeds to bestow prosperity and fertility for the newlyweds.
Later, it was decided that the plaster confetti was actually quite dangerous to throw so was replaced by paper discs, more akin to paper confetti we see today.
Is confetti bad for the environment?
Some types of confetti can be bad for the environment. The obvious reason for this is that unnatural materials are usually not biodegradable and stay on the ground as a health risk to local wildlife. These unnatural materials include confetti made out of things like plastic and foil. Paper confetti will biodegrade over time but there’s a chance that the dyes from coloured paper confetti will seep into the ground once wet and that this is also bad for the environment.
There has also been much discussion about using rice as confetti too. Urban legend and rumours have suggested that throwing rice is dangerous for birds and that they may even explode after the dried rice hydrates and expands in their stomachs! This has never been scientifically proven so perhaps a better reason not to throw rice is that it can really hurt when it hits the skin.
Eco-Friendly confetti at a wedding
Bearing the environment in mind, you might want to suggest that wedding parties only throw natural, eco-friendly confetti. This could include dried flowers, petals or maybe lavender – this smells lovely too. For something different, you could also suggest that wedding guests could blow bubbles around the newlywed couple!