Every year, Halloween comes around and I begin thinking about the number of Almond Joys I will be throwing away. Unlike the strange people that like both almonds and coconuts, I respond to to Almond Joys with… no.
So I begin looking for friends, classmates, and candy donation boxes that want them – and even then, I’m still left with a sizeable handful of Almond Joys. It’s handfuls of uneaten candies like these that build up across trick-or-treating households across the country. Over 600 million pounds of candy are purchased during Halloween alone, and if even a hundredth of that candy is thrown away, that’s still 6 million pounds of candy waste. Not including the candy wrappers.
The biggest problem with these candy wrappers is that they’re not recyclable. Otherwise, all we’d have to do is slap some posters on recycling bins and yay! That’s it. Turns out there are companies, though, that do offer candy wrapper recycling. The most famous of these companies is TerraCycle, which sells special TerraCycle bins to be filled with “unrecyclable” materials. Ship those bins back, and TerraCycle does the rest.
But recycling such unrecyclable materials is an expensive process. TerraCycle’s business model is a testament to that; you, the consumer, have to pay to get your own trash recycled. Not enough people know, not enough people care, and not enough people who care have the financial resources to purchase TerraCycle containers. It’s interesting to think about in this way: sustainability and eco-friendliness is a first-world phenomenon, as enough capital is needed to invest in green technologies and infrastructure.
There’s still hope for individual action, though. Candy wrappers make pretty good crafting material – they’re durable and colorful. There’s plenty of resources online for candy wrapper origami, for those post-Halloween, post-sugar rush crashes that might leave someone too tired to move off a couch (note: not healthy, please eat your candy reasonably!). There’s also the idea of giving out homemade candies or baked goods that can be wrapped in perfectly recyclable aluminum foil, but of course it’s important to make sure none of these homemade goods is contaminated.
So while to Almond Joys and candy waste I still say no, there’s definitely other ways around sending candy waste to landfills. Sure, that means putting in some investment, whether it be time (eating all that candy) or money (TerraCycling) or effort (arts and crafts!), but hey, when it’s the health of the planet at stake, the returns are definitely worth it.