In honor of 52 years of environmental activism on Earth Day, Earth911 presents 52 Actions for the Planet, actions you can take to invest in the planet and make your life more sustainable. Buy Halloween decorations in JulyPlan ahead to reduce the environmental impact of the spookiest holiday.
Even if you don’t have a sweet tooth, you probably eat a few pieces of Halloween candy every year. But all those little wrappers can add up and create a horrible waste problem. This week, invest in the planet by recycling your candy wrappers.
Action: Recycle the wrapper
Packaging waste
There’s a lot to love about Halloween, and candy ranks near the top of the list for many people. But Halloween candy poses a conundrum for ethical consumers, and you don’t want to be part of the problem. Childhood Obesity In America and around the world Child slavery While it may provide opponents of cocoa plantations with healthier, more sustainable snacks and fun alternatives to food, it’s pretty hard to completely avoid the tiny, individually wrapped candy in October: Americans buy 300,000 tons of candy and 90 million pounds of chocolate in October alone. During Halloween week.
The recycling dilemma
It’s time to get rid of your candy wrappers this October. But you can’t just put candy wrappers in your recycling bin. These tiny plastic wrappers are typically made of multiple materials, making them difficult and expensive to collect. And recycling them is complicated because each individual candy wrapper is a small-volume product, adding additional technical and economic challenges to collection and recycling. Unfortunately, their small size makes them more likely to fall out of the waste stream and end up in the ocean as plastic pollution. Paper cartons like the ones Nerds and Milk Duds come in may not be recyclable either; many of them are coated with plastic.
Vacation opportunity
While it’s not cost-effective to separate Kit Kat wrappers from the recycling stream year-round, Halloween candy wrappers are numerous enough that they can be bundled together. There are two mail-in recycling programs that accept separated candy wrappers.
TerraCycle offers both pre-paid boxes and pouches. Zero Waste Box It comes in three sizes (the smallest is 11″ x 11″ x 20″) and ranges in price from $86 to $218. Pouch It is 7.5″ x 10.5″ and costs $43. Rubicon Trick or Trash The boxes are the same size as TerraCycle’s small boxes, which would cost $100 if purchased individually. Neither company’s option is cheap, but they better reflect the actual cost of the candy we consume. Neighbors could pool their money together to share a box.
Fortunately, Rubicon offers options that don’t burden individual households with disposal costs. They provide their boxes free of charge to schools, community organizations, and businesses that want to serve as collection points. Parent groups can organize post-holiday wrapping collections at their schools, or businesses participating in neighborhood trick-or-treat programs can choose to be part of the solution at no cost.
If this system works so well that we rushed to get it done in time for Halloween, why not repeat it for Easter, the holiday that Halloween spends the most time on? More Candy More than Halloween.
Editor’s note: This article was first published on October 14, 2022 and updated in July 2024.
