There’s no doubt that Halloween has become crazily popular over the last new years.    

Gone are the days of running around in old sheets and witches’ hats made from cardboard. We used to go round to our friends houses and bob for apples and play a few games. Perhaps there’d be some paper spiders and a few cobwebs hanging around that were made from some kind of thread. Some kids went trick or treating but not everyone did. Am I showing my age?

Halloween in 2022 takes weeks (months?) of planning. We love having something to look forward to as the days get shorter. It is also a very lucrative festival for many retailers, UK shoppers are predicted to spend £687 million on Halloween in 2022. That is nearly triple the spending of 2013 when we spent a modest £230 million. According to Finder, in 2021, we Brits spent £25m on pumpkins alone!

Sadly, there is a dark side to our Autumn merriment – and that is the quantity of waste generated by Halloween. You only have to pop into your local supermarket to see the mountains of tempting loot. There are whole aisles stuffed full of disposable costumes, masks, decorations and endless random bits of plastic. Every single one of these items is destined for landfill or the incinerator come November. Along with the £25 million haul of pumpkins!

There is no question that this spooky festival presents an opportunity for us all to clean up our act so let’s look at ways in which we can make Halloween a bit more sustainable this year. 

  

Sustainable costumes

According to Cheaper Waste, it’s estimated that more than 30m people dress up for Halloween in the UK alone. The same article states that 7m Halloween costumes are thrown away in the UK each year.

An article by The Cut estimates that disposable Halloween costumes in the UK used 2,000 tons of plastic in 2019, not forgetting that the quantity of Halloween merch is growing dramatically every year. This astonishing figure equates to roughly 83 million plastic Coke bottles.

So how do you make sure that your Halloween bling doesn’t contribute to the monumental waste problem?

Firstly, buy your Halloween costume from a charity shop. There are plenty of easy ideas such as mummies and witches or you could get more creative. Try your hand at recreating grizzly or tragic historical figures like Vlad the Impaler, Anastasia or Rasputin. I really like this creepy doll idea from Save the Student.

You can also hire your costumes. Hiring your costume can give you some fun and unique options. Hiring a costume for your child also means they’re less likely to turn up in the same Tesco wig and cape as all their friends.

 

Don’t waste your Pumpkins!

If you’re a person who likes to keep a check on your food waste, this’ll give you pumpkin to consider! An article by Sileby Parish Council estimates up to 15 million pumpkins are thrown away in the UK every Halloween and the majority of these are put into landfill. The alarming truth is that decomposing pumpkins give off methane, which has 20 times the warming effect of CO2.

The pumpkin problem is very real and if you ask your search engine, it will return many articles about the issues caused by our discarded orange fruit (yep! It’s fruit, not veg. I checked.).

The obvious way in which you can reduce the environmental impact of your pumpkin is to eat it. Don’t throw it away, or leave it out for the animals, as some social media content suggests – cook it and eat it.

Pumpkins are versatile and can be eaten in sweet or savoury recipes, soups, curries, pies – even cheesecake! Check out this great list of pumpkin recipes from the BBC.

You should also buy your pumpkin locally. Many local farms sell pumpkins - and some allow you to pick your own  - so get yours from a farm nearby to save on pumpkin miles and unnecessary emissions. Supermarkets import their pumpkins from all around the globe and therefore, transporting pumpkins can generate an enormous amount of CO2.

 

Make your own decorations

Halloween decorations mostly fall into the same unsavoury categories as costumes – plastic and disposable. So how do you make your home look suitably spooky and welcoming (or scarily UNwelcoming!) for your grizzly visitors? Make your own, of course!

Making your own decorations presents a brilliant crafting opportunity that you can share with your kids, if you have them. Google is your friend and is bursting with dastardly décor that you can make from items that you have in your home or garden. I love the eyeball stones and the hanging bats in this list of 10 DIY Halloween Decorations created by Daisies and Pie.

Check out our video on how to make your very own tissue paper pumpkins, click here.

 

Sustainable Halloween Treats

The issues with chocolate have become much more widely known over the last couple of years. From rainforest-slashing palm oil to child slavery, our favourite treats have become tarnished with unnecessary bad practice. Unfortunately, most of the chocolate we buy uses palm oil and many companies still (possibly unknowingly) use forced labour somewhere in the supply chain.

Divine, Beyond Good, Chocolat Madagascar, Pacari, Moo Free, Booja-Booja, Seed and Bean, Montezuma, Tony's Chocolonely, Fairafric, Vego, Willies, Ombar, Mia and Nomo all produce chocolate without palm oil. Chocolate that is labelled “Rainforest Alliance” is harvested with environmental consideration and labour is chosen carefully. It seems impossible to entirely stamp slavery out in the chocolate supply chain but regulators like Rainforest Alliance inspect workforces carefully.

Halloween wouldn’t be Halloween without chocolate so no one is saying you shouldn’t include choc treats in your celebrations – just only buy what you need. We’ve all eaten ourselves into a choc coma post-Halloween! Also, ethical and sustainable chocolate tends to be quite expensive (though not always) so if loading up entirely doesn’t fit into your budget, you could perhaps just replace small amounts of your treats with ethical chocolate.

 

Have a Happy Halloween!

From all of us at Tiny Box Company, have a happy and sustainable Halloween. Why not tag us in pics of your wonderful homemade costumes and decorations? We’d love to see... @tinyboxcompany