How to slash Halloween's bone-chilling volume of plastic waste
Halloween is a wild, scarily popular holiday. According to market analysts at Statista, about 70% of Americans have fallen under its spell, and will spend about $12 billion this year in costumes, decorations, and treats.
While the spooky holiday brings excitement, creativity, and happy delirium for many kids, it also generates an unsettling amount of plastic waste.
"Plastic. It is scary. It has so many issues and harms associated with it, " remarked Dr. Jessica Heiges, who earned her doctorate from the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley and currently works as a project director at WSP, providing waste-free solutions to public and private companies.
She told CBS News Bay Area how most Americans have no idea about the threat posed by Halloween waste.
"It's a problem that's often gone unnoticed because we put it in a bin, and it gets carted away and it goes to landfill or incineration that's not near out homes and we forget about it. It's kind of out of sight out of mind, and yet its accumulating," Heiges cautioned.
Halloween costumes are just one example. According to a 2019 survey of researchers, a shocking 83% of costumes are made using fabrics like polyester, acrylic, nylon, or spandex, which are petroleum-based or derived from oil products and are very tough to recycle. 35 million costumes are thrown into landfill in the U.S. every year. Experts remarked how the amount is equivalent to 2,000 tons of plastic waste, or about 83 million bottles of plastic bottles.
Dr. Heiges and others point to some helpful solutions instead of tossing them out.
"If you have one of those polyester-based costumes for instance, or a costume that you're not keen on wearing again, that's where we need to have more reuse apparel approaches," said Heiges.
If you can't make your own costume, go to a thrift or vintage store. Donate your costumes to a charity like the Goodwill or the Salvation Army or swap them with neighbors, friends, parents, or schools. You can even sell them online.
"Potentially even earn some money from the costumes, and from that resale and not having to put your costume in landfill," added Heiges.
Another option is to provide your kids reusable canvas totes to collect their sugary loot instead of plastic pumpkin-shaped containers. Or washable pillowcases can carry quite a haul of candy.
Disposable costumes are not the only fright about Halloween. There is also a trick about the treats.
More than 600 million pounds of candy are purchased each year just for the Halloween. Most come wrapped in single-use, multi-layer plastics. These plastics are the hardest plastics to recycle, so they are usually headed into landfill.
"The waste from candy wrappers for instance can be in a landfill for if not decades, hundreds of years. It can outlive us," explained Heiges.
One solution is to make your own treats and wrap them in sustainable materials, but that strategy is unlikely to be widely adapted.
Instead, you can consider subscribing to a service like Ridwell, a company that collects hard-to-recycle materials like candy wrappers and find partners that can turn them into new products.
Another solution is for municipalities and customers to put pressure on the major candy companies.
"So that the wrappers are more sustainable, more environmentally friendly," said Heiges.
After Halloween, for the weeks or months to come, you and your family may find your home awash with too much candy. Your carved pumpkins might also be ready to toss.
Experts urge families and businesses not to throw them into landfill.
Unwrap all the edible treats and throw them in compost along with your pumpkins. Don't put them in landfill where the organic materials will only create planet-warming methane gas.
"Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide," noted the East Bay specialist.
One final note: Americans are projected to spend about $4 billion a year on decorations. Most are plastic. The best advice is to pack up those spooky displays to use them again next year or swap them with your relatives and friends. They'll be just as scary next year.