The spookiest thing about Halloween? The waste.
Whether it’s for the costumes, the sweets, parties or parades - the chance to be the fantasy or to make it happen for others. To trollop in novelty or age, back into history. The opportunity to play in the darkness and ring out the cold, in a manner that the specters would approve of, and they’ll tell you from behind bedsheets by how well they play the part.
Whatever iteration of celebration we find ourselves in today, we know this year is different; Our fears behind masks have been too real for too long. Yet we crave the opportunity to escape between their worlds. From the space and depths of the troubles that have haunted the world, we stand before infinite opportunities for a renaissance in how we come back to life. Yet there is this something sticky in the ether. An opportunity that begs not to be missed. So today, on Hallows Eve, how shall we immortalise the spirit of the night? How can it be sustained? Sustainably? Perhaps?
Of the world of materials we lay to waste each year, an estimated 7 million costumes are tossed annually in Britain. (Hubbub and the Fairyland Trust) Used but once, out of hundreds of millions of people celebrating, spending billions to do it, will amount to thousands of tonnes of plastic in landfills later in the season. As a visual for you, according to The Ocean Conservancy, 5,000 tonnes is equivalent to 41 blue whales (the biggest dang whales we know of). And that's in costumes alone.
The day is upon us, We’re not going to tell you to regret what you’ve already bought, (so long as it’s not hurting anyone as it is) but to think of what happens with those things next. If they won’t last to next year, and yet won't break down without harm (even the methane emissions and energy use from pumpkins going to landfills is. staggering.) It’s time to think of how they can have a new life rather than continue to contribute to our global waste management crisis. It's time to really think and act on what alternatives to look to as we wrap up this year and move into the next. Materials and practices that can last longer, do more, or degrade more gracefully than all this packaging on packaging on polyester and other plastics that corporate interests have branded as a yearly tradition.
In the early popularity of Halloween, costumes, decorations, and treats were largely homemade out of natural materials and household items. DIY isn't new. Nanna’s did it all, humans have been doing it since our dawn, we have only become disconnected from our crafts through technological innovations shadow of convenience culture, and material exploitation. Manufacturers saw an opportune market and greed made it's belly bigger than the earth's britches. So, fast forward to modern-day and the standard is made cheaply out of oil-based plastics, the average trick-or-treater apparently producing a pound of trash each, outfits with the unironic constitution of a trash bag. Thrift Stores have long been unofficial Halloween hotspots. The ones who still live by the thrift, have long been on a cutting edge of unique and more convincing costuming in a business that is inherently built on sustainable concepts so it doesn’t even have to try.
The Halloween they've been selling back to us, in the words of Buffy St. Marie, "it's just so expensive but it's just. so. cheap". It lacks the value of the Halloween that used to cost us less. We can dream better for our traditions, it could be fun. We could do that by letting our creativity run wild with the things we're usually too shy for in the second-hand aisles, scouring the forest for supplies it doesn’t need anymore, grabbing the scissors and being brave, breaking out the flour for papier-mache, breaking out of the contest remembering it’s the dead you have to impress tonight, checking labels, donating what isn't needed, and making this about how our rousing expression lives beyond us, rather than just the ruse.
