A Green Halloween

By: Sandra Stoner

Boo! In a little less than 3 weeks witches, ghosts, and princesses will be trick-or-treating in neighborhoods throughout the country and college students everywhere will be going out for a FRIDAY NIGHT Halloween. This spooky event traditionally calls for many important decisions to be made concerning things such as costume ideas and celebration locations; but this year let’s also pause to think a moment about the impact of Halloween on the environment.

Regardless of whether you want to be a nurse, football player, or Sarah Palin, try skipping your local Halloween costume store and opt instead for an original home-made costume. Those costumes that are bought every year at Walmart are usually made of plastic which are not easily biodegradable. And let’s face it, that Darth Vader cape that ripped three Halloween’s ago while you were out was most likely the result of the costume’s poor quality, not your outrageous strength every time you whipped it around your face.

Halloween costumes that are bought in a store, worn for one night and then quickly discarded, are wasteful for our planet. No one wants to think about the fact that the production of their devil costume released carcinogenic (cancer-causing) chemicals into our atmosphere and will likely waste away in a landfill for the rest of eternity, but nonetheless this is what will happen. You may think that this hardly matters, but remember that almost everyone under the age of 14 in the United States is wearing one, as are many college students and embarrassing dads; this means a lot of people, and thus a lot of costumes, are carelessly contributing to environmental degradation every year.

So for this Halloween let’s prepare with an environmental twist. Hundreds of people are already planning and have set up a website dedicated entirely to a “Green Halloween.”

Check it out at:
http://www.greenhalloween.org/content.php?page=costumes
This site lists green costume ideas as well as provides links to Halloween stores that stock environmentally friendly costumes.

If you want to make sure these home-made costumes look hot enough, check out the following website for some of the best home-made costumes out there:
http://www.thedailygreen.com/green-homes/latest/recycled-halloween-costumes-470708

Lastly, try to refrain from using an entire bottle of hairspray to complete your recycled costume on Halloween night. Not only is hairspray bad for our environment, but it is also a really unhealthy habit. This article is a great reminder of the harmful chemicals in hairspray and also offers some other products that will cement your hair into a witches nest rather nicely:
http://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/146/1/Hair-products-and-the-environment.html

So have fun piecing together the scariest, most original costume out there, and if you care to share (or just brag about your awesome idea), please do!