10 Steps To Organise A Completely Eco-Friendly Birthday Party

Kermit the frog once said, It isn’t easy being green. He probably was speaking for parents of the world.

With children comes a tendency to hoard and hoarding comes in all forms of plastic. As soon as you become a parent, you begin to notice bottles, plates, cups, spoons, teethers, toys, strollers — and more in all shapes, colours and forms of plastic. And then comes the birthday party where a new parent simply doesn’t know where to stop. After all a birthday comes, but once a year.

If you are a parent wondering if parenting can go green, we are here to walk you down that primrose path. Here are 10 steps to host a completely eco-friendly, green birthday party for your child. Remember, these are tried and tested tips!

Eco-friendly Invites: With apps like Canva and so many more, why would you take the effort of printing invites? Simply log on and choose from the thousands of designs and colour schemes to create the perfect e-vite!

Venue: We chose a public park that is centrally located and that couldn’t have gone better with our eco-friendly green birthday party!

Food: We chose to keep it simple and wholesome and selected homemade finger foods that were made from locally sourced ingredients. We entrusted a home baker with our cake and cookies. This largely avoided packaging and kept our costs within check. Small things like giving fondant a miss, makhana instead of pop corn, opting for a whole wheat carrot date cake and avoiding processed foods were healthier choices while ensuring the kids still loved the food.

Left Overs: We offered doggie bags to guests as they were leaving and shared the rest with some very amused street vendors, beggars and the cops at the park.

Tableware: This is usually a large area where wastage happens at a birthday party. Here is what we did.

Compostable plates and cutlery
We used recycled kitchen jars for drinks with name tags to encourage use of only one glass per person
We used paper straws instead of plastic ones
We brought along a glass water dispenser
We used bamboo/woodentrays and jugs which are as durable and aesthetically pleasing
We carried cloth napkins that can be easily washed.

Return gifts: Instead of buying the plastic knick-knacks we bought locally sourced seeds and put them in a dinky tin watering can for each child. We put these in upcycled shopping bags free of gift wrap. As ecofriendly as it gets!

Decorations: Being outdoors means you’ll hardly need any decorations to spruce up the place. We started with reusable and durable fabric decorations that I had used for my baby shower and we have used twice since then. They only paper decorations used were hand me downs. We skipped balloons all together!

Games: Some of the best-loved party games while outdoors are hanging on trees and rolling on the grass. We threw in some balls, slates and chalks and a child sized vintage metal car for good measure.

Waste: We cleaned up our mess and limited our trash including cardboard boxes to one bag for the entire party.

Scale: Remember to keep the party small. We called close friends and family and that ensured there wasn’t much noise and we were able to leave the park without creating too much of a mess.

Like we said, it doesn’t have to be too hard! Going green and especially teaching kids from when they are young, goes a long way.