Green Weddings and Events

Planning a wedding, baby shower, or engagement party? Or maybe just a neighborhood barbecue or housewarming party? Worried about all the trash an outdoor event creates and yet not quite able to provide washable dishes and servingware for all your guests? Consider using compostable products and partnering with the Kompost Kids to green your event and ease your conscience.

It all began with a proposal. Yes, two green-minded brides popped the question. And after all our years of diverting restaurant food residuals and festival refuse, Kompost Kids decided we were ripe for the picking. So when we were contacted about taking compostable products and food waste from two Milwaukee weddings this summer, the Kompost Kids offered a double, emphatic yes! We were ready to take our relationship with food waste to the next level.

It wasn’t love at first site. We had to purchase a shredder. We had to evaluate which elements were worth shredding (plates, bowls) and which were not (napkins, bags).

Figuring out how to chip all those palm-leaf plates or corn-based serviceware took some practice and patience, but in the end, our passion for landfill diversion carried us through, and we reduced four large bags of wedding trash from 125 guests to about 6 inches of organic matter covering the bottom of one of our pallet piles.

The remainders of a night of romance and fellowship were obliterated in a matter of minutes, and now the material is mixing with coffee grounds and wood chips and gradually converting into a humus-like soil amendment.

As we consider offering a suite of green-event planning services – from self-drop to full-service options – to interested customers, we will continue to experiment with compostable products and find out which ones work best for our sites. In the meantime, if you are interested in having the Kompost Kids “crash” your wedding or other event, don’t hesitate to contact us. It’s all part of our mission to close the loop on local waste streams and contribute to local soil regeneration.