The climate-friendly solution to ditching your Halloween pumpkins

Every Halloween, millions of candle-lit pumpkins illuminate porches and doorsteps across Canada to greet the costumed hordes of trick-or-treaters seeking bowls of candy.

But this glorious display of gourds and sugary treats comes at an ecological cost. Statistics Canada estimates that over 82,000 tonnes of pumpkin are grown in the country each year. Many become jack-o-lanterns and once festivities end, they’re sent to the landfill (or smashed on the road), where they rot and generate methane, a greenhouse gas 28 times more potent than CO2. 

The cost of candy is even higher. Most Halloween candy is packaged in plastic wrappers, which create problematic waste. But faced with excess treats, few people take the time to separate the candy from the plastic before disposing of them. The result is vast amounts of unnecessary plastic waste, in addition to the methane generated when the sweets eventually decompose. 

"It's a massive issue," said Tammara Soma, a professor at Simon Fraser University who studies food waste. "I hate to break the party, but if we're thinking about resources and the value of things, it just doesn't make sense." 

In past generations when most Canadians lived on farms, where discarded jack-o-lanterns became livestock feed and pre-packaged sweets didn't exist, the tradition had minimal impact on the environment. But in modern life, it is harmful, she said. 

While Halloween-specific data are hard to obtain, Statistics Canada estimates that about a fifth of all food produced in Canada – including pumpkins and candy – is wasted. All that wasted food generates about 9.8 million tonnes of greenhouse gases, equivalent to the yearly emissions of 2.3 million gas-powered vehicles

Even some of the supposed solutions to the Halloween excess problem make little sense. In 2011, the Hershey company – maker of Reeses', Kit-Kat and Hersey's Milk Chocolate bar – started collaborating with global livestock and commodity giant Cargill to transform its excess candies into sweet cattle feed. Cargill has since built an entire processing facility in Pennsylvania to turn candies into cattle feed. 

While on the surface, the collaboration reduces waste, it exemplifies a systemic problem, Soma said. 

"We need to look at why this is even necessary," she said. The efforts are fueled by excessive candy production, which relies on industrial corn farming – an industry plagued with harmful pesticide and synthetic fertilizer use. The candy-based feed is used in factory cattle farms, themselves major sources of greenhouse gases and pollution.

Still, there are ways to make Halloween less gruesome for the environment : 

• Don't buy individually-packaged candies. If you do, buy too little rather than too much to minimize waste. Unwrap any leftovers and separate the candies, which can be composted, from the plastic packages. 
• Buy your pumpkins locally to reduce the amount of fuel needed for transportation. If possible, buy organic pumpkins to reduce the amount of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers sprayed on fields. 
• Don't carve pumpkins; decorate intact ones instead. This protects them from rot, allowing you to cook with them once Halloween festivities are over. If you do carve pumpkins (let's be honest, it is fun), try to eat the seeds and flesh. If you're not a pumpkin fan, find a way to feed them to a farmer's livestock – dogs also often like the gourds and they can be baked into treats, – put them in the compost bin or bury them so they compost in the soil.