Scary movies, haunted houses, and terrifying costumes.
These are just a few things that make Halloween the scariest time of the year.
But behind all of the pumpkins and candy lies something truly frightening. An environmental footprint that will send shivers down your spine!
An environmental footprint, also called an ecological footprint, measures the impact of people on the environment.
From discarded candy wrappers to food waste, the spooky season has a pretty ugly environmental footprint.
Here are a few tips to make this year’s Halloween scares more sustainable.
Oh My Gourd!
Pumpkins are a hallmark of Halloween, used to decorate throughout the holiday. Because of this, it’s easy to forget that pumpkins can be used for much more.
For example, pumpkins are an incredible food source, packed with loads of nutrients.
In Canada, over 80,000 metric tonnes of pumpkins are produced each year.
But we don’t eat most of them. More often than not, these pumpkins end up in landfills after Halloween.
In the United Kingdom (UK), of the 10 million pumpkins grown every year, a haunting 95 percent of these pumpkins are used at Halloween and then thrown away.
That’s a horrifying amount of food waste!
It takes a lot of resources to produce pumpkins for Halloween.
Fertilizers used to grow pumpkins also release a large amount of nitrous oxide, a gas 300 times more harmful to the climate than carbon dioxide.
Pumpkins that end up in landfills also release methane, a gas responsible for about 30 percent of the rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution.
So what’s the solution?
Consider buying reusable decorations, preferably ones that aren’t made of plastic.
Or, better yet, make your spooky creation using household items.
If your heart is set on using a pumpkin, consider eating it!
There’s no shortage of pumpkin-related recipes online. If you plan on pumpkin carving, use the goopy guts to make some delicious roasted pumpkin seeds.
When your pumpkin is ready for the grave, don’t send it to the landfill! Compost it instead. Better yet, donate it to a wildlife rehabilitation centre like Cochrane’s Ecological Institute.
If you go the compost route, here are some options.
Calgary runs an annual fall leaf and pumpkin composting program. Participants can bring their bagged leaves and pumpkins to any of the city’s more than 30 drop-off locations free of charge.
Last year, Edmonton’s John Janzen Nature Centre hosted a pumpkin smash event.
“We are just having a good time…One last opportunity to celebrate the end of Halloween,” Rodney Al, the city’s home compost program coordinator, told CTV News.
During the event, participants crushed more than 250 jack-o-lanterns into smaller pieces for compost.
Give Old Bones New Life
Thanks to technological advances, we have electronic decorations like Lewis the jack-o-lantern, who took Halloween by storm last year.
But electronic decorations come with more than just a hefty price tag. Making these products requires valuable resources like copper and lanthanum.
Lanthanum is a soft metal and one of the rarest materials on the planet.
Lanthanum is used in hybrid car batteries, carbon lighting, optical lenses, and more. Mining it is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.
When it comes to copper, there isn’t enough of it in the world to justify its use in Halloween decorations. The current copper shortage is expected to last until 2030 and beyond.
When these decorations are thrown away instead of recycled, they end up in landfills or are incinerated, which is bad news considering e-waste contains toxic substances like plastics, lead, and mercury.
Waste from electronics is also non-biodegradable, meaning it can’t be broken down by natural means.
Instead of buying new decorations, consider using old electronics like Christmas lights to turn your house into a haunted house.
Water with food dye can make convincing blood and old dolls are creepy.
Get creative this Halloween and see what you can come up with! If you need some inspiration, here are a few sustainable Halloween decorations that will get at least a few spooks!
Leave Single-Use Plastic For the Dead
Single-use plastics, such as cutlery, cups, balloons, and food containers, are the leading cause of plastic pollution worldwide.
More than 170 trillion pieces of plastic are estimated to be floating in the world’s oceans. These plastics devastate our environment and kill millions of animals every year.
The plastic typically used in bottles, bags, and food containers contains chemicals associated with adverse health impacts like cancer, birth defects, and immune system suppression.
Halloween is like the dawn of the dead but with single-use plastics.
Plastics that find their way to landfills take hundreds to thousands of years to “decompose.” The plastic never truly disappears. It gets smaller and turns into microplastics.
Microplastics seep into the surrounding soil, which bleeds into groundwater and other water sources.
Eventually, these plastics enter the environment and can harm local wildlife. In 2021, a research team discovered microplastics in the North Saskatchewan River.
From our drinking water to our food supply, microplastics are found everywhere.
You likely ingest about a credit card’s worth of plastic every week! So this Halloween, ditch the plastic. Instead, think about making homemade sweets and wrapping them in paper bags.
Dress To Impress
In most cases, Halloween costumes are used once before they end up in landfills.
Most of these costumes can’t be recycled because they use oil-based plastics. In the UK, more than 80 percent of Halloween costumes contain these plastics, which is about the same as 2,000 tonnes of plastic waste.
Even if you reuse costumes, they release microplastics when washed.
The microplastics travel through the wastewater system and eventually enter the environment.
But we get it! Dressing up as Michael Myers every year gets stale. Instead of buying an overpriced costume at a store, try making your costume!
Tearing up old clothes you don’t wear anymore makes great zombie attire. To really sell the costume, don’t sleep for a couple of days.
That’s a joke; please sleep. Check out your local thrift store if you can’t find anything old and torn around the house! Not only is this more sustainable, but your wallet will thank you!
There are plenty of ways to enjoy Halloween while minimizing your environmental footprint. Not only does this help protect the environment, but it also teaches our kids the importance of living sustainably.
But Halloween is just one day out of the year. We must live sustainably every day, so take these tips and use them daily.
