The UK has adopted America’s attitude towards Halloween. The Americans love it, it seems to me. They celebrate Halloween with gusto. They spend lots of money and have a lot of fun. Great to have fun but not so great if it is at the expense of the environment and at the moment switched on people should be concerned about the environment particularly plastic pollution which is gross across the entirety of this blue planet we call Earth.
The growing popularity of Halloween in the UK is causing a huge volume of plastic waste and sadly, research indicates that it’s become the biggest single use event of the year by which I mean the single biggest ‘use of plastic event’ of the year.
In the UK, spending on Halloween has quadrupled (four times more than the pass) over the past 10 years to about £1 billion annually. This is the American way and entire streets are sometimes decorated with Halloween objects such as plastic skeletons, cobwebs and spiders.
Many children like to dress up and go trick-or-treating.
A study has been commissioned by the online marketplace Gumtree about plastic pollution from Halloween. More than 75% of Britons who bought Halloween decorations and masks et cetera admitted to throwing them away after a single use.
And has been calculated that this means that as many as 46 million individual items of plastic could be binned annually in the UK which works out at about 3.2 items for every child.
2,000 British citizens were polled in the survey. The research found that Halloween shoppers bought an average of 10 themed items for the event annually.
These include bags of plastic-wrapped sweets which were the most popular and which were bought by 85% of the participants in the survey.
74% said they bought decorations and 70% bought costumes. 62% bought masks and more than 50% bought cutlery or crockery, usually plastic cups and plates.
And they were all thrown away because they are cheap and flimsy. 20% of those surveyed admitted to binning the items because they were ‘too scary’.
And the researchers concluded that buying one costume per year wasted enough carbon to heat a home for a month!
A anti-waste charity called Wrap is urging people to reduce Halloween waste by for example buying real pumpkins and using face paints instead of plastic masks.
This year, it’s reported by The Times that 11 million people plan to dress up in Halloween costumes having spent an average of £49 on the costumes.
More: Microplastics found in human brain for first time (infographic)
