Hosting your first low-waste Halloween

Between the decorations, trick or treating, and focus on tasty snacks, Halloween can easily become a celebration that generates mounds of rubbish. This year, host a low-waste Halloween and celebrate the spooky season without the added horror of excessive waste.

Keep things simple

If this is your first low-waste event, avoid overcomplicating the planning for the best chance of keeping waste to a minimum. A little creativity can turn upcycled everyday items, foraged recycling, and inventive home cooking into the perfect haunted house.

Make your own low-waste Halloween decorations

Homemade Halloween decorations make use of existing resources, reducing waste from the start. By making your own, fewer commercial decorations – mass produced and heavily packaged – will be needed.

Natural decorations from outdoors

Leaves changing colour and falling from trees are one of the most recognisable sights of autumn. Bring this evocative display indoors by arranging collected leaves around natural candles or tins of dried flowers for a beautiful seasonal centrepiece.

To conjure creepiness, collect gnarled sticks and twigs and use them to add a sense of dread encroaching on your home and garden. You could also drape old lace and linen over larger branches to cover ordinary furnishings, removing the need to strip existing décor entirely.

Choose candles and save energy

Halloween’s gloom provides an excuse to save energy and keep the lights off without raising questions from your guests. Use natural soy or beeswax candles to light the room and create the perfect eerie atmosphere.

For safety, make sure any flammable items are kept away from naked flames and light the room adequately to avoid trips or falls.

Resurrect your unwanted clothing

Save damaged or unwanted clothes throughout the year and use them to dress up scarecrows, skeletons made from broom handles and branches, or sprawling spiders.

Cheap costumes worn once and discarded are responsible for one of the biggest seasonal wastages. Consider piecing together an outfit from pre-loved clothing or rent a costume that can be returned and worn again.

Even the most threadbare or damaged ‘rags’ can be sewn together to make a zero-waste Halloween costume. Create a dishevelled zombie costume or be mummified without wasting yards of toilet paper. Save costumes and props you do create for future festivities.

Halloween character puppets

Bamboo paddle skewers can form the support skeleton for puppets made from material scraps. Dress up ghoulish ghosts, dastardly devils, and jaunty jack-o’-lanterns, adding decorated marshmallow faces for an edible finishing touch.

Use food as a feature

Double party snacks as decoration to develop the theme of your party while reducing waste. With your catering as the central focus, fewer material decorations will be needed.

Choose snacks that are easily decorated

Fruit makes for simple and versatile customised snacks. Update classic Halloween treats such as ‘boo-nanas’ by dipping them in white chocolate for an even more ghostly appearance and extra sweetness.

Carefully mash cranberries to use for natural bloodstaining. Cut apple slices to look like vampire teeth and dip the tips in your homemade cranberry juice for Dracula-inspired snacks.

Baked goods are another foodstuff you can match to a theme with little difficulty. Decorate a full cake for an attention-grabbing centrepiece or spread your designs across individual biscuits and cupcakes.

Avoid food waste

Some of us will have played Halloween games where foods are used to represent gross and gory substances for blindfolded guests. Unfortunately, these poked and prodded ingredients must then be discarded, creating unnecessary food waste .

Instead, use food for games by saving snack decorating until your guests arrive, allowing them to personalise their treats. That way, one batch of ingredients can be an all-in-one activity, decoration, and meal.

Alternatively, carve pumpkins as a group and save the insides to bake into pumpkin, cinnamon, and maple syrup pies.

Treats without the trick

Consider sourcing and giving out sweets wrapped in paper or foil to trick or treaters, to reduce plastic waste.

Traditional toffee apples are a simple, seasonal treat which can be made entirely plastic free. Baked goods such as brownies, blondies, or cookies will always go down well.

Enlist help from compostable catering supplies

Compostable products, made from natural resources, make low-waste catering easy without compromising on reliability or performance.

At FOOGO green, Our tableware is made from either naturally shed areca palm leaves or reclaimed sugarcane, while our straws, cutlery, and skewers come from renewable natural resources. Once used, they can be home composted, returning to the earth to nourish future plant growth.

Suitable for evoking subtle autumnal themes and haunting Halloween experiences, compostable tableware takes the fright out of post-party clean-up. Browse our range of eco-friendly catering products to stock up for your upcoming spooktacular events.