Go Green this Halloween!

The spookiest night of the year is nearly here but it’s a time to scare your friends, not the planet! There’s plenty of recycling to be done around Halloween and lots of ways you can reduce the scary amount of waste generated by the fearsome festivities.

Here are a few frighteningly good tips on how to go green this Halloween (they’ll save you a few pennies too):

• Don’t be scared of the pumpkins! Make sure you scoop out the flesh before carving and turn it into something delicious. There are plenty of ideas for some taste treats on the Love Food Hate Waste website for you to choose from.
• Get creative with your ghoulish costumes and buy second-hand, reuse old outfits, or make your own from old clothes, left over bits of material or recycled rubbish.
• Use face paints to create your own scary faces, rather than buying plastic masks.
• Make your own spooky party decorations – paper bunting tied to string, coloured in pictures of spiders and skeletons, you could even try making your own paper-mâché pumpkins.
• Ditch the evil disposable partywear and just use real plates, glasses, and cutlery.
• Offer your trick or treaters some homemade treats such as pumpkin shaped biscuits – it makes a change from all the sweets and cuts out the horrible plastic wrappers going to waste.
• Make sure to recycle as much of your Halloween waste as possible, especially if you have any leftover food, cans, plastic and glass bottles from your frightful parties… just add them all to your recycling boxes.
• Although they can’t be recycled from home, most plastic wrapping, including sweet wrappers, can be recycled at collection points in your local supermarket. Just remember to bundle them all up and take them with you next time to go shopping.
• Once they’ve had their day, your old pumpkin shells can be added to your compost heap or cut up and popped into your food caddy. If they are really big (and not too rotten) they can be left on top of your kerbside food caddy for a one-off post-Halloween collection by our crews. Please remember to remove any candles first.

Cabinet Member for a Greener Powys, Cllr Jackie Charlton, said: “Most people in Powys are already doing a great job of making sustainable choices and recycling each week. But we can all do a little bit more, especially during these seasonal celebrations.

“Making an effort to be ‘greener’ is becoming easier with more and more of us choosing to reduce, reuse and recycle more than ever. The added bonus of these more environmentally friendly options is that they often save us money too… particularly important in these times of austerity.”

For more information on recycling, please visit: What do I do with my recycling and rubbish (household)