How to go green for Halloween
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The spookiest time of the year is nearly here. After Christmas, more money is spent on Halloween than any other seasonal event, and it's one of the most wasteful times of year too.
More than five million pumpkins end up in landfill after Halloween, along with around seven million costumes. The rubbish shouldn’t be the scariest part of Halloween! Here’s our guide to turning your Halloween into Hallow-green.
Food
Here are our top tips to turn your Halloween food from ghoulish to delish:
Make your own Halloween treats. There are thousands of recipes on the internet that you can whip up in no time, leaving you with no waste and making yours the go-to house on the street for trick-or-treaters. Look out for our creepy Halloween cupcake recipe, and the Vegan Society’s fantastic collection of spooky recipes too.
Ditch sweets wrapped in plastic. Hand out pick and mix sweets that aren’t wrapped in plastic, rather than individually wrapped sweets. You could buy loose pick and mix sweets from your local sweet shop, or you could even try making your own.
Costumes
Not only are Halloween costumes pretty pricey, they usually contain some kind of plastic, or at least come wrapped up in lot of packaging. Instead of buying your spooky outfit this year, try making your own:
Scour the charity shops for costumes. Most charity shops have a dedicated Halloween costume section at this time of year, but if not you can still find everything you need to make your perfect spooky costume if you hunt around. Plus, after Halloween you can take the costume back to the shop to be resold. Win win.
DIY Halloween costumes. There are loads of really easy costumes you can make at home:Spectre-ular – wear a white sheet over your head to be a ghost Mamma mia! – wrap yourself up in toilet roll to be a mummy Fang-tastic – dress in black and smear tomato ketchup on your chin to be a vampire Zom-bie yourself – wear some old clothes and put talcum powder in your hair and on your skin to be a zombie.
Decorations
Getting in the spooky spirit is easy, and it doesn’t have to cost the earth to make your Halloween decorations:
Turn out the lights and light some candles – it’ll save energy and add to the spooky atmosphere.
Put up solar lights to light the way for trick-or-treaters. The only energy they use has been generated from the sun.
Use synthetic wool to make spider web decorations. You can wind them back up and use the wool for something else after Halloween.
Use a marker pen to draw pumpkin style faces on satsumas. They’ll make great decorations and a tasty treat the next day.
And finally….. the pumpkin
99% of pumpkins sold in Britain are carved for Halloween, and most of these end up in the bin. You can actually recycle every part of the pumpkin once you’ve used it as decoration:
Roast the seeds – they make a great snack, or a tasty addition to a salad.
Make a delicious autumnal pie, soup, cake or curry out of the filling.
Cut the pumpkin in half and put it outside for the birds and squirrels to feast on.
You can put whatever you don’t use in the compost bin.
We hope that helps you to have a ghoulishly green Halloween – now whack on The Monster Mash for a round of musical zombies. Happy Hallow-green!
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