Ashwin Malwade and Nupur Agarwal launched Green Myna in 2020 to help people host 'green' weddings and events.
Ashwin Malwade, a chief officer in the Merchant Navy, and Nupur Agarwal, a marketing professional, met during a beach clean-up drive on Mumbai’s Versova beach. Their mutual interest in the environment and sustainability brought them together and they decided to get married but only in an eco-friendly way.
After months of planning for their minimal green wedding, they chose Pune as their destination for the convenience of accessing an easy recycling system. They used upcycled materials and flowers for decoration and made sure that the flowers were composted the next day.
The bride and groom wore sustainable clothing handmade and organic cotton. Nupur wore a lehenga made from her mother’s saree.
The groom’s baraat arrived in an electric car and the leftover food was distributed to the less privileged to ensure zero food wastage. To amplify the green message, the couple planted four trees for every guest who attended their wedding. The guests were also given return gifts wrapped in locally sourced paper bags.
Their wedding impressed many and soon they were bombarded with several queries about how to host a green wedding. Thus to address them all, the couple launched Green Myna in 2020 to bring about a change in the mindset of people and to guide them.
So far, they claim to have mitigated over 3000 kg of carbon emissions from being released into the atmosphere and have planted over 300 trees while hosting green weddings.
Watch their inspiring story:
Edited by Yoshita Rao
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