Daybreak - The Big Fat Sustainable Indian Wedding

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

Welcome to the big fat sustainable Indian wedding! Over the last few years, sustainability has become a big buzz word in the wedding industry. Multiple wedding planners told Daybreak that couples are now increasingly asking for more ‘sustainable’ alternatives while planning their big day — from offsetting the carbon footprint of the event, to setting up compost pits in the middle of their wedding venues. This growing environmental consciousness makes sense. You see, as beautiful and fairytale-esque the typical Indian wedding is known to be, it is also infamously wasteful. But here's the thing — while some couples may be thinking about ‘sustainability’ more than before, the numbers tell a whole different story. Indian weddings aren’t getting any smaller. They are bigger and more expensive than ever before. About Rs 6 lakh crore was spent on weddings in 2024. That’s a 40 per cent increase from the previous year. And that’s not all – data shows that one in every 100 of those weddings had a budget of over Rs 1 crore. So how does sustainability co-exist with the grandeur of the Indian wedding? And can it? Daybreak host Rahel Philipose speaks to Ashwin Malwade, founder of Greenmyna, a sustainable event planning company, and Anirudh Gupta, the co-founder of Climes, a climate tech company. Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production. Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording.

Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get alert, as soon as we release our first video. episode, please follow intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcast or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. A couple years ago, Ashwin Malwade made one of the biggest decisions of his life. He was going to ask his girlfriend Nupur to marry him. I proposed to Nupur in a national park, again in the lap of nature.

And I said, okay, you know, I'm... I want to marry you, but in a one condition, we are going to have a sustainable zero-waste wedding. She was like, what is that? A sustainable zero-waste wedding made complete sense for Ashwin and Upur. After all, they met for the first time at a clean-up drive at the infamously dirty Versova beach in Mumbai back in 2018. And over the next year, they just kept going back. Literally, all our dates were amidst trash on the beach. That's how we actually found love.

and one fine day I said enough, I think I'd seen enough and we've spoken enough. It was time to take the plunge. Ashwin is in the merchant navy and Nupur is a marketing consultant. But what drew them together was their shared passion for the environment. So having a sustainable wedding was but natural. The thing is, this was back in 2019. And back then, sustainable weddings weren't really a thing yet. Then, was there some template that you could go by

or were you kind of figuring it out as you went along? Absolutely not. Absolutely. There was no template. And the funny part is when I did propose to the next, you know, question was go back to the parents and say, okay, now this is what we've done. I've proposed to.

I'm not asked you. But now we have to plan the wedding. And when we said that we want a, you know, a zero-waste wedding, they said, what is that? That's not possible. Okay, spoiler. Ashwin and Nupur eventually figured it out. They had a beautiful wedding in Pune on the 22nd of December 2019.

Ashwin wore his uncle's wedding Sherwani. Nupur wore an upcycle lehanga. They planted a tree for each of their 230 wedding guests to offset their carbon footprint as much as they possibly could. There was a strict ban on single-use plastic. And to Ashwin and Nupur, the day was perfect. They also learned a lot along the way. No, I mean, we realised that this is in the way forward.

We had to set an example. because that's the least we could do at a wedding and we knew that it was not going to be completely a carbon neutral net zero went there are going to be some emission. Also, we wanted to do our bit. It's been a little over four years since Ashwin and Nupur got married.

And now, sustainability is a big buzzword in the wedding industry. I spoke to multiple wedding planners who said couples are increasingly asking for more sustainable alternatives while planning their big day. And this growing environmental consciousness does make sense. You see, as beautiful and fairytale-esque as the typical Indian wedding is known to be,

it's also infamously wasteful. I spoke to Anirud Gupta, the founder of Climbs, a Delhi-based climate tech startup, and we use Climbs' emission calculator to get a sense of the carbon footprint of a hypothetical Indian wedding. The numbers were very startling. So let's do this.

So first we had to feed in basic details. about the event. So let's assume we're doing a 500-person event. The next question is how many days is the event for? Typically, like, two or three, let's say three. Let's say three. All right. So it's automatically assumed, like, energy consumption for those days.

Then there were some very specific questions, like the percentage of non-vegetarians attending. There were some obvious ones, like how many people will be flying down? How many goodie bags will you be handing out? It also gives you the option of how you would like to offset the carbon emissions generated by our event. So we fed in all those details and we finally arrived at a number.

Okay, so now it says your event has a footprint of 2,000 115,000 kilograms, which is 210 tons, 211 tons. That's crazy. Okay, so say an environmentally conscious couple decides to offset

211 tons of carbon emissions on a platform like climbs. They would have to cough up about 4.2 lakh rupees. and turns out now people are down to do it. But while some couples may be thinking about sustainability more than before, the numbers tell a whole different story. Indian weddings aren't getting any smaller.

They are bigger and more expensive than ever before. About 6 lakh crore rupees was spent on weddings in 2024. That's a 40% increase from the previous year. And that's not all. Data shows that one in every hundred of those weddings had a budget of over one crore rupees. So how does sustainability coexist with the grandeur of the Indian wedding? And can it?

Well, let's find out. Welcome to the big fat sustainable Indian wedding. This is Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host Rahil Filippos, and I'll be joining my colleagues Nika Sharma every day of the week to bring you one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Friday, the 10th of January.

Back in 2019, Ashwin and Nupur's wedding went viral on social media. People had seen nothing like it before. And soon enough, the couple realized that they were on to something. There were hundreds of people reaching out to us, saying, oh, we also want to get married in a zero-waste, low-waste manner. Can you help us out? I said, and that's where Nupur and I realized, what have, you know, what is, you know, what's really come about here?

What have we given birth to? So they decided to set up their own company. They wanted to help people organise their own sustainable events, including weddings, of course. In September 2020, we were sitting on our dining table wondering, okay, we want to start a company, what will the name be for it? So the first name should be green. I said, great, it's green, what the next word should be. and we were on a balcony and we saw two minas on our balcony and we kind of researched more on them. We realized that common minas were prepared for life.

We also, when you see them and they always see two of them and it's supposed to be a good omen. They organised their first wedding in 2021 between the first two waves of the COVID pandemic. It was a 3,000 person wedding in Raipur, Chhattisgad. The couple had heard about Ashwin and Nupur through social media and reached. out to them saying they wanted to organize a green wedding of their own. So we, without any prior experience of hosting another wedding,

jumped into Raiphor. Executive that wedding and Raipur being a Tier 2 city, there was just not even the basic waste management systems in place. Waste management is one of those less glamorous aspects of organizing a wedding that is

absolutely integral. It's the process of managing waste from cradle to grave. And in the case of this particular wedding, as you would imagine, Ashwin and Nupur wanted to, A, keep waste to a minimum, and B, ensure whatever waste was generated did not end up in a landfill. We actually set up a compost pit at the wedding venue. And that kind of became a selfie point for all the guests who were coming at the wedding.

And post the wedding, in fact, all the guests, the couple actually put all the wedding flowers into the compost pit. So that is a very famous picture that's gone viral on social media about couples coming to the composting unit. You see, Ashwin says 80 to 90% of the thousands of kilos of waste generated by the average wedding is not segregated at the source. And a lot of this waste generated is non-recyclable. So it ends up in a landfill. The Green Maina philosophy is now not a pull of zero waste weddings, which Ashwin says are impossible because there's always some amount of waste that is generated. but instead to pull off zero waste to landfill weddings.

Now, since that wedding in Raipur, Greenmina has come a really long way. They've organised dozens of sustainable weddings and corporate events. They even collaborated with the ICC World Cup last year and helped them divert about 4.5 lakh kilos of waste which would have otherwise gone to a landfill. I wanted to understand how event planners today generally go about organizing a more sustainable wedding.

Ashrin said first and foremost, you have to understand the amount of waste that would be generated by the prospective wedding. I think the numbers are kind of astounding. I mean, we have done carbon audits for quite a few weddings. And destination wedding for 300 people in India would generate at least 350 tons of waste. It's nearly impossible to offset this kind of emission generated at a wedding as well. So I think the idea here, the first premise is how to. do we kind of minimize the carbon emissions that are generated?

And this is travel of the guests to the destination, the events spread across three to four days, you know, and you know kind of waste that is created after. So the numbers are staggering. You will need to plant at least 50,000 priests to, you know, try to at least minimize part of the emissions that you create at one single wedding. Right. Ashtwin, but the one thing that I've realized from all these conversations that I've had with, you know, wedding planners, with people in the climate space is that sustainability seems to mean different things to different people. So I'm curious to understand what a truly sustainable event is in your opinion. Right. I think sustainable in its, you know, very terminology, if you break that word out, it means no harm to the environment or something which is everlasting. thing. So that's what we wanted to, you know, break it down. If you're causing no harm to the environment,

then that is a sustainable event or an event. So we break it down to kind of each and every. So we work on, you know, four verticals actually within an event. One is the decor element. The second is the catering. The third is waste management. And the fourth is the impact measurement. Because the fourth actually is very important because if you have done one, two, three correctly, then the impact numbers really speak for itself. Generally, event planners like Greenmina collaborate with a bunch of different vendors to keep things running as smoothly

and sustainably as possible. For instance, one vendor may be a company that helps considerably reduce the PM2.5 and PM10 emissions of the commercial generators used at nearly every Indian wedding. Another may be a company that helps offset the carbon

emissions generated during the wedding. Another may be an NGO that collects and distributes all the leftover food at the wedding. The list goes on and on. Pulling all of this off is a lengthy and sometimes even expensive process. Generally, Ashwin and

Nupur engage with clients six months before their big day because that is how long it takes. But Ashwin is of the opinion that budgets don't really matter. When it comes to sustainability, you have to do the best with what you've got. So you've done budgets, we have done a

wedding which had a budget for about three lakhs. because they just wanted to do a wedding over a crore. So the spectrum is quite large. As such, and each one of them wanted to incorporate sustainability. Yes, the scale of sustainability incorporated in an over-craw budget

was different from what three lakhs did. But because the budgets were lower, we could do a lot more because the guest list was lower. You know, the venue was, it was a single day event vis-a-vis a three-day. So it does, I can't really put a number,

yes, people should not be afraid of doing a sustainable wedding just because they might think a budget might be out of the bandwidth. For the most part, people want sustainability to fit into their perfect wedding and not the other way around. And Ashwin says that that is okay. We do not want to dilute the aspirations a couple or the parents have for a wedding. But how can we minimize it? Would we believe in if we do 100,

imperfectly done sustained wedding, then one perfect one. You know, it's still everything, every step that you take matters. Even if, you know, not having single-use plastic

will in some way kind of nullify or, you know, reduce the amount of emissions that you would generate at a wedding. And I think, you know, today emissions are very hard to measure. But the morning after an event is when the true impact can be really seen.

But aren't good intentions enough to reverse global warming? Well, I mean the answer is obvious, no. But what then is the actual impact of something like a sustainable wedding? And what's even the point? Stay tuned. Almost nobody I've spoken with hates climate. Everybody likes it or is indifferent, right?

Which is a good enough starting place. Weddings kind of piggybacked on that to broadcast someone, someone's green credentials and make them look good and actually bring like 100 more people, 200 more people into being aware of this. And in a country like India where people spend so much at weddings, it's just a perfect, like, it's like catching lightning in a jar, you know? The perfect use case to demonstrate climate credentials. That's Anirud Gupta, the founder of Climbs.

Earlier in this episode, we tried out Climbs' carbon footprint calculator. Now, Clim says its aim is to make it as convenient as possible for individuals and enterprises to take meaningful climate action. And it does this by matching climate solutions with, capital. So today, Climes has a bunch of different products on offer. It works with brands like Make My Trip, Neiman Shoes and about 30 odd others by enabling their customers to actually see their carbon footprint and pay a little extra money,

which could then go towards carbon removal projects. It also gives customers the options to pick which project they want to support. But back when the company was launched in 2021 during the COVID pandemic, one of its first use cases was well a wedding. Our first use case partner, official partner became a wedding company called the Wedding Brigade by this awesome founder, Sana

at that time. And yes, we were just offered as an option to a couple of couples getting married. And why it worked really well is climate is not necessarily thought of as a default choice today, right? But our goal is to make climate action mainstream and

make it a default choice. That's how Climes got into the business of Carbon Neu. neutral events. So an event organizer, or a couple wanting to get married, for instance, uses the calculator to figure out the carbon footprint of the event. They can then pay to offset the emissions and also pick the carbon projects that their money will go towards. In the process, you can also get your whole guest list involved. But our big learning from this is making this available at an event kind of turns the entire two, three day event into a little bit of a collective exercise, right? Like, everybody's in on this.

you can go and participate, you can actually see how many other people have done it. And then there's like this feeling of collectively getting it to 100%. And whether or not it reaches 100%, that capital will still be paid out to all of the projects that went on the, you know, into the climate project basket. Right. So, Anirut, you know, words like carbon offsets, carbon credits,

these have become buzzwords around the world today. Right. And I think people do have a general sense of how it works. but I don't think they have a clear sense of where that money goes, the projects that it's going towards. Usually, I think people assume it's just going towards planting trees, but that's just one way to offset your carbon footprint, right? I'm curious to know what makes a carbon project good, right?

Like, what does a good carbon project look like? Yeah, absolutely. So there's a few criteria that project has to qualify on. Number one is, is it additional? So additionality means without this additional carbon financing that comes in, would this project have been viable or not? So typically carbon markets should be, you know, they should have additionality. Like the project shouldn't just be economically viable without carbon markets. Carbon markets are a tool to enable a project to reach critical mass so that it can then be developed.

The second one is how permanent and durable is it? We want to lock away carbon for a very, very long time. Yeah. Not temporarily. Some solutions, some climate project solutions, are better than others. Another factor over here would be what is the risk to it? So you can actually estimate man-made risk and natural risk to a particular climate project and say, okay, this has very, very little risk, higher quality project.

But the more fundamental question here is whether voluntary offsets actually have enough of an impact, whether they can contribute to slowing down global warming in a meaningful way. Or if they're simply a way for people, in this case, couples looking to get mass, married to deal with what a lot of critics of this sort of thing call green guilt. The other thing to consider here is that the voluntary carbon offset market has really been through it. The first reason for this is obvious. Sure, offsetting your carbon emissions feels great in the moment. Woo-hoo, I'm a climate warrior.

But a legitimate concern that a lot of people have is that it could potentially increase people's energy-consuming ways. Then there is the problem that lies with a lot of offset projects themselves. You see, very often, consumers don't know what they are buying and what project their money is going towards. They also don't know the actual impact that the project has, whether it will actually reduce atmospheric CO2. So how do you know a good egg from a bad egg in the voluntary offset market? Well, I asked Annie Rud. So I think I'm an outlier in this. I think it's been a very good thing that has been heavily criticized.

And I think systems only really improve when a light is shown upon them. When things don't have visibility, when there's no light shining on them, they happen in darkness. All kinds of shady things happen. It's very, very good at multiple organizations have actually gone and done deep dyes, right? Because net net, the entire system has actually gotten far better. The bad actors are largely getting cleaned out, right? Bad actors meaning project developers or auditors. overall pricing systems have improved.

Overall transparency and impact reporting has improved. It's stress tests like this, like 2024, that improve the overall system. And I can't stress like how much, how important it is that market-based systems like the carbon markets need to build better. Right. Like it's still imperfect, but imperfect is better than nothing. In the imperfect model, at least we move more capital. Right. I guess that begs a more fundamental.

question, impact. So much has been written about whether carbon offsets, particularly the voluntary kind, actually make a difference, right? How they just about barely scratch the surface. So, I mean, what's the point then? Yeah. I mean, this is an existential question for us too,

because we've thought about it. In three years, how much of an impact have we even really made, right? It's more than zero, but it's definitely still a drop in the ocean compared to how big the problem is. And how do we reconcile that? So we feel good about the fact that we are moving forward and doing more, but it's still scary because it's nothing compared to how much needs to be done. I think the numbers on the table are what 40 billion tons of carbon needs to be avoided every year.

And an additional 10 billion tons needs to be removed every year from what's already out there. So 50 billion tons is huge, right? That's going to take about four to five to six trillion dollars of capital a year to avoid and remove that much carbon. I think 2025 and 26 and 27 are the years to actually scale up, not just what clients is doing, but other companies like ours too. All hands on deck. Like that's the only answer. We can't afford to not do it.

Right. Okay. So in the end, it all comes down to behavior and intent. I have a big question for you. As someone who is in this space, how do you trigger change in how people behave and how they look at their own carbon footprint, right? What needs to happen to trigger more fundamental and large scale changes?

Wow, that's a great question. That's a really big question. Yeah, yeah. No, but it's at the root of like what we do. You know, we're a climate finance company, but really we're a behavior change company. An example of that is, you know, one of our products, clients API, putting it on checkouts, showing people like carbon emissions. And then just seeing how many people opt in to neutralize those emissions is a great signal for like how many people care, right? Yeah.

And it's taught us a lot about do people care to see emissions? Do they care to like pay a little bit more to offset and utilize? I think the way to really drive home behavior change would be the cost has to be borne by the brand or enterprise serving us. But the individual needs to be the one holding the brand or enterprise accountable. So rather than cost passed on to individual like you or me, it's the enterprises we buy from that need to actually be held accountable by the public. and in doing that, showing, okay, here's what our environmental impact today is of environmental damages of serving you this product. And here's what we're doing to actually reduce it over time.

Right. I think that two-part play is really important. Enterprise pays, but individual holds accountable and participates. And if one of the two is missing, we can't really drive home that behavior change at scale. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription unlocks daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and podcast extras. Head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website.

Today's episode was hosted and produced by Rahal Philippos and it was edited by Rajiv Sien.