Some people may agree that as we get older, we begin to care about holidays less and less. The magic and anticipation behind the day begins to fade. As for Christmas, Santa doesn’t seem too realistic anymore, and for Thanksgiving, the food begins to get repetitive. But for a holiday with some of the most potential to go full out, Halloween has been getting decreasingly scary, and instead more wasteful, every year.
Almost all the costumes I see or consider attempting, someone else has already made it into a cuter version of what it actually is. Rather than wearing clothes that actually resemble the thing you are dressing up as, people tend to lean toward the classic cute top, simple bottom, and an accessory or two. We just don’t put as much effort into our costumes, which makes them much less recognizable. They aren’t as scary, aren’t as funny and just overall more plain. This completely takes away from the uniqueness and originality of costumes.
Social media is partially to blame for this. As kids we used to spend weeks or months dreaming about who we would get to dress up as to go trick or treating. Now, we just use social media like TikTok and Pinterest to find a costume that is somewhat achievable with what we already have in our closet. This also results in there being many repetitive costumes. Using social media can also mean that our costumes don’t actually reflect our personal interests but rather just our fashion preferences.
But our own efforts aren’t the only problem with the holiday. On average, the Halloween costumes that end up in the landfill are equivalent to around 2,000 tons of plastic waste. These costumes, however, are not the average outfit high school students are wearing on Halloween night. This is actually due to the pre-made costumes that are made from non-recyclable oil-based plastics, which means they’re destined to end up in a landfill. Plastic polymer, which can take anywhere between 20 and 200 years to decompose, is used in about 83% of these costumes.
This is a lot of waste to produce for costumes that are of poor quality. They are often ill-fitting, uncomfortable and sometimes don’t even last throughout the night. Last year for Halloween, I had an inflatable costume that broke within the first 10 minutes of my night and deflated on me while I was still in it. When these cheaply made costumes get thrown in the trash the next morning, this is a huge waste of Halloween.
A different cause of this Halloween pollution is the candy and pumpkins. This year, Americans will buy approximately 600 million pounds of Halloween candy, with the average trick-or-treater generating one pound of trash. While trick-or-treating is part of the fun, the non-recyclable candy wrappers are the majority of the waste. Lots of places recommend finding treats with minimal packaging or even making your own sweets to reduce the amount of wrappers filling our garbage cans in the weeks after Halloween night.
As for the pumpkins, there are about 1 billion pounds of them sent to landfills annually. However, pumpkins are the easiest of all to find an alternative approach to. For starters, pumpkins are compostable. Either let it break down in your own compost bin or take your jack-o-lanterns, with all the decorations removed, to your community compost center for them to take care of. There are also some opportunities for pumpkins to be donated to local farms or zoos to feed to the animals. You can also use your leftovers from carvings to make soups, pies and other treats. For such an easy fix, we shouldn’t be letting rotting pumpkins add so much to the Halloween pollution.
Lastly, there are the decorations. Year after year, I have been seeing fewer and fewer decorations in my neighborhood. Granted, the cost of Halloween decorations has gone up to an unreasonable amount. I remember when stores like CVS and Family Dollar had interesting decor at a normal cost. Now, the decorations from places like Spirit Halloween have become so dramatic and over the top that the average person isn’t willing to spend $150 on just a Halloween prop. While at least they’re spirited, unlike our costumes, it’s best to just reuse the decorations from previous years. That way, much more waste is saved from pollution.
Overall, I don’t think we should let the pollution from Halloween make the holiday any less exciting. Our costumes could be thrifted and donated, which would make the originality and creativity of our outfits much more unique while also saving our environment from potential waste. Rather than letting Halloween be the same thing from our childhood, we have so many more options now to be more original than just store-bought products.