What Is An Eco-Friendly Halloween?

Posted on Oct 31, 2019 in Sustainable Living & Sustainable Lifestyle by Matthew Speer 0 Comments

An eco-friendly Halloween involves handing out treats to trick-or-treaters that are environmentally conscious and promote sustainability. Because you can’t simply make edible gifts and hand them out to strangers, the trick is to find packaged items that meet eco-friendly Halloween standards.

The following looks at some of the different items you can hand out to make your Halloween an eco-friendly holiday. It not only is better for the kids, but it helps to educate both them and their parents on ways to be more environmentally friendly on Halloween!

Chocolate and Candy

If you’re looking to have an eco-friendly Halloween, then it’s important to hand out items that send the right message. While it’s tempting to bake your own cookies with all-natural ingredients, for safety reasons most parents are going to throw out homemade goods. So that’s going to lead to food waste, which you don’t want.

But you can ditch the traditional chocolate bars and candy and still hand out sweet treats with items such as the following recommended by Social Moms.

Glee Gum. Glee gum is an all-natural product made from chicle (which comes from tree sap), fair trade sugar cane and brown rice syrup.

Yummy Earth Lollipops. These all-natural treats are economical and even have one version with a boost of Vitamin C.

Endangered Species Bug Bites. These organic chocolates and candy are GMO-free certified, and the cocoa is harvested from Rainforest Alliance Certified farms.

Non-Candy Goodies

There are also plenty of ecofriendly gift ideas if you don’t want to hand out a snack. Halloween-themed items that are eco-friendly are out there if you take the time to do a little searching. Here are some ideas to get you started.

Halloween erasers. These erasers come in all the characters kids love about Halloween – vampires, ghosts, werewolves, black cats, bats, pumpkins, etc.

Temporary tattoos. Look for the kind that use vegetable-based ink. The only waste will be the backing paper, which is relatively small when you think of most candy wrappers.

Halloween-themed pencils. You can get colored pencils that kids can use when they do art.

The idea here is that you’ve eliminated a lot of unnecessary packaging and in some cases have given the kids something they can actually use.

Promote Activity

Another way to make a departure from “the norm” is to give kids something that will lead to activities rather than eating candy.

One timeless idea are hacky sacks, which are small bags filled with rice or beans. Kids use them to balance on their feet and kick to each other as they stand in a circle. It’s a game that’s been popular with teens for decades.

Another idea is to hand out jump ropes that the kids can use to get exercise and have fun. And if exercising the mind is more of a goal, then consider handing out art supplies that will spark some creativity.

The great thing about the rules of Halloween is that there aren’t any. If you want to have an eco-friendly Halloween, the only person keeping you from doing it is yourself. Think about what the kids in your neighborhood might like to have and don’t be afraid to hand out something that will stand out from everything else.