With this bio poop bag, I thee wed

If there is palpable love between a couple on their wedding day, a friend once proffered, nothing else matters.

"You could be eating hot dogs in a church basement and no one would care."

This is the kind of idea that raises ire in the booming wedding industry, out to peddle the overblown fairy-tale fantasy that's now a fixture in North American life - a fantasy that reaches its zenith each June.

Though as Rebecca Mead, New Yorker staff writer and author of the book One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, points out, it wasn't always this way.

"In 1939, one survey showed that 16 per cent of brides were married in clothes they already owned; a third married without an engagement ring, and roughly a third didn't go on a honeymoon.... The idea that the weddings we have today are traditional is a falsehood."

The surfeit of goods and the sizable waste involved in the $161-billion-a-year (U.S.) wedding industry, coupled with the mainstreaming of ecological thinking, has made the galvanizing of green weddings a no-brainer.

"This year, people are talking about it in a different magnitude," says Ms. Mead from her cellphone in New York. "The eco-wedding is officially a certifiable trend."

Here comes the bride, all dressed in -- green.

White weddings might have been the dream of fashionable brides of old. But the trendiest British weddings are now at least metaphorically green as couples seek to reduce the impact of their nuptials on the environment.

That means everything from recycled wedding dresses and guests arriving by bicycle, to home-grown flowers and locally produced food for the wedding buffet.

"A year ago there was nothing green at wedding shows. I was really struggling to get the message across that green weddings are about "eco-chic", not lentils and hessian," said green wedding planner Ruth Culver.