Taking Consumerism out of Halloween to make it Sustainable

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 09:03:55 +0100

Today is yet another day humans will celebrate something with one-off products. Not bothering what happens to the products after they are used.

They go the waste, right? Or may be you recycle them? And then, they eventually go to the waste, right? Right.

Did you you know that the amount of plastic is greater than all land animals and marine animals combined?

Well, plastic has become unavoidable. Yet, we can reduce single-purpose plastics as far as possible.

But how do I celebrate without dressing up?

This raises two questions:

How was Halloween celebrated historically?
Can I still do a kinda-modern celebration without creating waste?

The first is an interesting question. A quick read at wikipedia tells us “Wearing costumes and playing pranks at Halloween did not spread to England until the 20th century.” Roughly, consumerism is a very recent century or two old phenomena compared to the human history of several thousand years. This might be a nice read.

I still don’t know what exactly a traditional Halloween celebration looks like? I’m told I should visit rural or semi-urban areas of Europe to find out.

There’s some nice waste statistics on Modern Halloween by WasteManaged.

As for the second question, there are plenty of guides once you start searching, for example, this article by Forbes.

Wish you all the best to a guilt-free celebration!

PS: If you created waste this year, that’s something to keep in mind for the upcoming celebrations! Be it Christmas, New Year, or the next Halloween! Or any other festivals you celebrate!

Waste on digikar's microblog

Taking Consumerism out of Halloween to make it Sustainable