With the climate crisis becoming ever more apparent, it’s important that we all do our bit to try and help the planet.
Nowadays, Halloween is a heavily celebrated time of year, and a popular time to splurge on novelty items and decorations. It’s the perfect time of year to hold parties in celebration, which of course is not a bad thing. However, amidst all the fun, it can be easy to forget what impact our actions could have on the planet.
Before I start, I’d like to make it clear that I am not a party pooper. I love Halloween just as much as the next person, but there are some easy wins and changes that we can make to our Halloween habits that will help us act a little more responsibly at this vital time.
In this blog, I’l be sharing tips and tricks to lessen your impact this Halloween without spoiling all the fun.
Thrifting For Halloween Decorations
One of the easiest and most enjoyable swaps we can make to our Halloween habits is buying second hand decorations and merchandise instead of new.
Thrifting our Halloween knick-knacks helps to keep things in the loop, ensuring they don’t go to landfill. It also, with time, would hopefully create a lesser demand for new items and encourage less production of new Halloween material in the future. While this perhaps doesn’t sound so enjoyable, it would mean more resources would be saved in the future, which is certainly a worthwhile sacrifice. Plus, there are still millions of Halloween products in circulation already, so we won’t be missing out!
Make Your Own Decorations
Not only is this a great idea for entertaining the kids this Halloween, but making your own decorations can be more responsible than buying them, too. Most homemade crafts avoid the use of plastic and packaging, and would have a lower carbon footprint.
You can easily make fun Halloween decorations from paper, card, paper mache, or wool, and there are plenty of DIY ideas online or on social media to get you started.
Avoiding Single-Use Items
While single-use napkins, paper plates, cups, and decorative straws can be fun at Halloween, single-use items are one of the most common ways to create waste in our current society. They are a waste of resources, usually have large carbon footprint, and are destined for landfill.
Using reusable, decorative crockery and kitchen utensils instead doesn’t only give you the option to hunt for a great spooky dinner set, it means you’ll throw less away each Halloween.
DIY Halloween Costumes
Buying secondhand costumes, or creating your own costume with clothing you already own or have thrifted is a great way to reduce waste while saving money and getting your creative juices flowing.
Creating your own costume instead of buying a ready-made one would also mean you have a costume like nobody else, and you will look completely one of a kind at your Halloween bash!
Trick Or Treat
Making trick or treating more environmentally friendly is difficult. While plastic-free and unwrapped sweets would be great, this could be unhygienic if multiple people are handling the sweets, or if children are picking them out themselves. Therefore, looking for foil or paper wrapped alternatives to hand out would be the most sensible option, as these can be recycled afterwards.
If you are trick or treating with your child and end up collecting numerous plastic wrapped sweets, save the empty plastic wrappers and drop them off at your local soft-plastic drop off point. This might sound like a loft of effort, but it’s surprisingly easy. Most supermarkets in the UK now have soft-plastic drop off points, making it incredibly accessible to drop off your waste.
Do you have any tips or tricks for a more environmentally friendly Halloween? We would love to hear them in the comments!
Halloween Activities In The UK
If you’re looking for a fun way to spend a weekend this Halloween, check out our range of spooky day guides by clicking here.
Disclaimer: Images on this blog have been obtained from Pexels and do not belong to Hunting Horror.