Zero Waste Halloween

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With #Halloween just 4 weeks away we have some tips and hint to help you make your Halloween more waste free.

  1. Halloween Costumes

Every year almost 7 million Halloween costumes are thrown away this equals to around 2,000 tonnes of plastic waste. 🎃 The majority of Halloween outfits are made from polyester, an oil-based plastic and most people then chuck out used costumes after single use !! 👻 Landfill is literally full of scary apparel 🎃

So this year let’s make a change , here’s some things you can do!

  1. Set up a costume swap at your child’s school or class or you even at your university or place of work !
  2. Donate old costumes to charity shops or to Halloween costume amnesty’s
  3. Encourage your friends and family to get creative and make their own costumes.
  4. Buy a second-hand costume from a charity shop
  5. Hire one from a costume shop.
  6. Upcycle your old costume using what you have in the house !

Whatever you do , don’t buy new!!!

2. Halloween Decorations

Instead of decorating your house with brand new plastic spooky skeletons, inflatable grave tombs and plastic light up pumpkins .. A Zero-waste Halloween décor is your ideal solution.

1. You can use old fabric, clothes, cardboard and garden waste, like twigs or leaves, to create spooky decorations.

2. Hold a Halloween decoration swap with friends or family or at school or work .

3.Have a look in charity shops and pick up second hand items

4. Buy eco-friendly decorations that can be recycled or reused for next year.

3. Smashing pumpkins taste great

It’s likely that over Halloween, over 39.9 million pumpkins will take the streets, and 22.2 million will go to waste. That totals over £32.6 million worth of edible food waste and with a #costoflivingcrisis going on we can all get on board and stop this waste.

All pumpkin varieties are edible – just make sure to go for an orange one and turn the flesh into some thing tasty !

Here is super easy pumpkin soup recipe for you to use up the pumpkin flesh!

Easy Pumpkin Soup

Ingredients

1-2 pumpkins , 1 onion , 1-2 garlic cloves , 1 stock cube , 1-2 pints of water

Step 1

Place peeled pumpkin, onion, garlic, broth/stock and water into a pot;

Step 2

Boil rapidly for 15 minutes until pumpkin is very tender;

Step 3

Use a stick blender or transfer to blender to blitz smooth; and add salt and pepper to taste, then add either milk OR cream – whichever you prefer.

    3. Trick or Treat

    So if you are rushing out today to stock up on the sugar treats for trick or treaters remember sweet wrappers can’t be recycled as they are often made from multiple materials, e.g., plastic or paper with aluminium.

    We can’t recycle these materials together, making sweet wrappers impossible to recycle.

    If you are buy sweets today buy them in glass jars so you can reuse the jar for future use.

    If you have time, bake Halloween treats and split them so trick-or-treaters receive a home-baked, waste-free goodie!

    Useful links

    Here are some useful link to help you;

    Click here to read Halloween waste busting tips

    Click here to find out about Halloween activities for kids

    Click here for spooky sewing tips

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