Trick or Tat? It’s time to rein in Halloween decorations
Amid a looming environmental crisis, my disdain for tatty Halloween rubbish goes beyond my own misery, writes Rose Morelli.
I know, I’m a buzzkill - but my disdain for tatty Halloween rubbish goes beyond my own misery. Amid a looming environmental crisis, we need to ask: are tonnes of Hallo-waste really necessary to keep kids happy this October?
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Halloween has always been a time to throw some whimsy on our fears. Come 2025, and we’ve all progressed past supernatural fears into real-world threats: the fall of democracy, the depletion of drinkable water, or whichever teenager on a bike will next try to snatch my phone.
But as someone who is genuinely scared by the threat of climate change - an animatronic witch leaking battery acid into a landfill is not the sort of whimsy I’m looking for this October.
I must have missed the moment a few pumpkins stopped sufficing as Halloween decor. It’s a shame, because they’re the ultimate two-birds solution to keeping your kids happy: they’re cheap, free of plastic waste, and carving them provides a solid night of keeping kids away from the alt-right internet pipeline.
But somewhere along the line, we were convinced by consumerist forces that pumpkins, sweets and costumes weren’t enough to keep your kids happy - now, we also need to inundate them with tacky plastic witches and ghosts on every surface of your home.
Even before homeware stores started dedicating three aisles apiece to ghoulish green plastics, Hallo-waste posed a big problem. In 2019, environmental group Hubbub estimated that, from discarded costumes alone, 2,000 tonnes of non-recyclable plastic waste are generated in the UK each Halloween. That’s the equivalent of 83 million plastic bottles.
It begs the question: with this already eye-watering environmental cost for a single Halloween weekend, why are we adding tonnes of skeleton-themed tablecloths to the mix?
I’m not arguing we ban Halloween fun entirely. If we’re going to accept public holidays inherently come with an environmental cost (I’ll get to my Christmas-whinge in late November), we need to mitigate the damage we cause with smarter choices.
It might be time to broker a new consensus between consumer and manufacturer. One where the consumer accepts their kids probably don’t need a non-recyclable statue of the grim reaper to enjoy Halloween - and where the manufacturer stops trying to punt tat onto the public en masse.
We can still use Halloween as a means to throw whimsy on the horrors we face in the real world, and we can still enjoy its excesses. But let’s stick to what kids actually want from Halloween: kilograms upon kilograms of sugar.
Besides, Ozempic exists for a hefty Haribo binge. No such wonder drug exists for decomposing a plastic sign that says “WITCH, PLEASE”.
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Rose Morelli is a writer and journalist.
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