Camarillo Acorn
October 26, 2024
If you have not yet bought a costume for Halloween, you still have time and options.
A fast solution is to order a cheap, plastic costume online or pick one up at a big box store. Beware, though: Many of these single-use, disposable costumes may look adequate on the packaging or in photos, but that’s because the images show the costume on an impossibly gorgeous model or a super-cute kid. Usually, disposable costumes look like what they are . . . cheap, imported junk destined for a landfill on Nov. 1.
Instead, consider a durable, reusable costume. You will look better and can wear it again in another year or pass it on to someone else.
Thrift stores offer an inexpensive way to take this less wasteful path. Goodwill stores, for example, have been especially good at making costume design easier for customers. The thrift store chain sells new Halloween accessories in its stores that can be paired with clothes and other items from its regular inventory of donated items.
For example, if you want to dress up as the white rabbit from “Alice in Wonderland,” all it takes is a white outfit, bunny ears and perhaps a clock. A plaid jacket, colorful tube socks worn over pant legs and a top hat with a band around it creates the Mad Hatter. A blue dress, white leggings and a croquet mallet invokes Alice. These costume suggestions were first assembled a few years ago in a “Look Book” sent to local stores by Miguel Valencia, Goodwill’s director of operations, who first saw the book in another of the district’s stores. He consulted with local Goodwill marketing manager Tammy VanDeusen, who followed up with advertising and a social media campaign helping people visualize the costumes they could put together.
Similar creativity can be applied to create costumes from items you already own. An internet search for “homemade costumes” reveals several options relying on clever wordplay. For example, if you have a graduation gown, just tape pictures of cookies on it and, voila—you’re a “smart cookie.” A Hawaiian shirt plus a lei and boxing gloves? Hawaiian punch. If you wear medals and carry bread, you are a “bread winner.” One clever costume simply consists of signs or iron-on letters saying, “Go ceiling” and “Ceilings are #1.” What is that? A ceiling fan. Stick a bunch of “Hello my name is” tags on yourself, all with different names, and what are you? An identity thief.
You can also use creativity to avoid the most ubiquitous Halloween waste. Candy wrappers are recyclable only through extreme measures, such as reuse for crafts or mailing with other items in a “Zero Waste Box” to terracycle.com with a $105 payment for as much as you can fit into an 11-by-11-by-20-inch box.
A promotional program sponsored by Rubicon, a software company focusing on waste solutions, has in past years provided free Halloween wrapper recycling boxes as part of its “Trash or Treasure” program, but that has been “paused” this year, according to the company’s website.
The only practical way to avoid wrapper waste is to give out items other than candy. Money is one option I have used; kids smiled at the sound of a handful of coins dropping into their bags. Used small toys, such as hot wheels cars, were another option I once tried, but that was less popular, and perhaps a little weird. The Good Housekeeping website features an article titled “45 Best Non-Candy Treats for 2024,” but many of their suggestions are far more wasteful than
candy, such as glow sticks, light-up rings and tiny containers of slime. The article’s less wasteful choices include a deck of cards, trading cards, pencils, coloring books and LEGO bricks.
One more waste tip for Halloween: Pumpkins, including seeds, can be recycled in your curbside yard waste cart without a bag, even in curbside programs normally requiring bags for food. This exception is allowed because pumpkins are considered an “agricultural or green material,” according to Ashley Kennedy, supervising environmental health specialist with the Ventura County Environmental Health Division.
However, if you have attached self-adhesive plastic rhinestones, glue-gunned beads, studs, rivets or other unnatural decorations to your pumpkin, then put it in your garbage cart. No one wants Halloween pumpkin bling contaminating the compost of their spring flower beds.
David Goldstein, an environmental resource analyst with the Ventura County Public Works Agency, can be reached at (805) 658-4312 or david.goldstein@ventura.org. https://www.thecamarilloacorn.com/articles/halloween-waste-reduction-recycling-is-not-scary
