Eco-Friendly Halloween: Costumes, Pumpkins and Homemade Treats

Halloween produces an unusual amount of rubbish for a single evening: a costume worn once, a bag that splits, a pumpkin thrown out with its seeds still inside, and several hundred individually wrapped sweets.

None of that is the fun part. The fun part is the dressing up, the doorbell and the sugar — all of which survive perfectly well without the packaging. Here is the low-waste version, sorted by the thing in front of you.

Costumes: thrift first, and go specific

The cheapest and greenest costume is one that already exists, and the thrift-shop version is almost always better anyway, because a rail of random clothing pushes you towards a specific idea rather than a generic one.

• Go for a particular thing, not a category. “Vampire” needs a shop-bought cape. “A tired substitute teacher” needs a cardigan and a lanyard, and it is funnier.
• Shop the accessory first. One strong object — a hat, a pair of glasses, a single glove — decides a costume faster than a whole outfit does.
• Raid the kitchen for the finish. A dusting of cocoa or flour, a smear of grenadine, a bit of charcoal from a cold grill. Face paint tends to come in plastic pots that get used once.
• Set up a swap. If four families each pass on last year’s costumes, everybody gets something new and nobody buys anything. This works far better than it sounds with children under about ten.
• Keep the packaging you cannot avoid. If you do buy something, keep the bag it came in and pass the costume on in it next year.

A trick-or-treat bag you make in ten minutes

Plastic pumpkin pails crack, and the thin printed bags tear halfway down the street with a full load.

• A pillowcase is the classic, and it holds more than any bought bag. Sew or safety-pin a length of ribbon across the top corners for a handle.
• A tote bag plus fabric scraps. Cut a jack-o’-lantern face from orange felt and glue it on. Felt does not fray, so it needs no hemming and survives being stuffed in a drawer for a year.
• A paper grocery bag with the handles doubled. Fold the top edge over twice before punching the handle holes and it will not tear under a kilo of sweets.
• Whatever you make, write the name inside. Bags get put down at every party and are indistinguishable in the dark.

Use the whole pumpkin

The pumpkin is where the waste really is. A carved one is usually binned within days with everything edible still in it.

Buy it from a local grower if you can. Pumpkins are a heavy, low-value crop that travels badly, and the farm-stand ones are usually fresher, which matters because a fresh pumpkin carves cleanly and lasts the week rather than collapsing.

Roast the seeds. This is the easiest win of the whole evening.

1. Pull the seeds out of the stringy pulp and rinse them in a colander. Do not attempt to get every fibre off; a few are fine.
2. Boil them in salted water for 10 minutes. This is the step everyone skips and it is the one that makes them crisp rather than leathery.
3. Dry them properly on a tea towel, toss with a little oil and salt.
4. Roast at 300°F (150°C) for 30–40 minutes, stirring twice, until they are pale gold. Higher and faster burns the outside before the inside dries.

Sweet variation: toss the roasted seeds with a spoonful of maple syrup and a pinch of cinnamon and put them back in for three minutes.

Cook the flesh, but only from a cooking pumpkin. Large carving pumpkins are bred for size and are watery and bland. If you want purée for a pie, buy a small dense one — sugar pie, kabocha, red kuri — alongside the carving one. Roast it cut-side down at 400°F (200°C) for 45 minutes, scoop, blend.

Compost the shell the day after, before it softens. A carved pumpkin left out past about four days becomes a job rather than a task.

Treats without the wrappers

Wrapped sweets are the largest single source of Halloween rubbish, and they are also the least interesting thing on the table. A tray of something made that afternoon beats a bowl of miniatures.

• Peanut butter cups. Melt chocolate, spoon a layer into paper cases, chill, add a disc of peanut butter mixed with a little icing sugar, top with more chocolate. Twenty minutes of work, an hour in the fridge, and they are better than the bought ones.
• Honeycomb. Sugar, golden syrup and bicarbonate of soda. It foams up alarmingly, sets in an hour and shatters into pieces. The most theatrical thing you can make in a saucepan.
• Toffee apples, which are the only Halloween food that is also the decoration.
• Ghost meringues. Pipe blobs of meringue with a peak, bake low and slow, dot the eyes on with melted chocolate.
• Chocolate bark with whatever is in the cupboard broken over it. No shaping, no setting time to speak of, and it uses up ends of bags.

For anyone doing the door, the low-waste answer is not homemade — nobody takes unwrapped sweets from a stranger, quite reasonably. Buy the largest bags you can rather than individually boxed novelties, or hand out something that is not food at all: stickers, pencils, a coin.

The day after

• Leftover sweets freeze. Chocolate keeps for months and is better in baking than fresh anyway.
• Costumes go in a labelled box now, not in March. This is the entire trick to the swap working next year.
• The pumpkin goes to the compost or the green bin, not the general waste, where it produces methane rather than soil.

If you would rather someone else ran the kitchen

Making treats with children is the best part of this list and the part most likely to be abandoned at 5pm on a weeknight. If you want the evening to happen without you planning it, Rockoly’s Halloween cooking specials are built for a kitchen with children in it — Spooky Charcuterie is arranging and decorating with no heat at all, and the Yummy Mummy Calzone hands everyone dough to wrap.

For a team rather than a family, the virtual Halloween ideas post has the workshops, what they cost and the free games worth running yourself.