INTRODUCTION

Halloween may offer a chance to dress up as his namesake, but it doesn't provide
many other opportunities for the eco-conscious. Any holiday that involves creating
a ridiculous costume that you're going to wear exactly once while you gorge on
prepackaged junk food is not exactly tailor-made for going green.

Let's start with the reason for the season: all that candy. Diets rich in sugary
foods are typically considered less eco-friendly than those with modest amounts; in
Sweden, for example, a model diet crafted by a team of environmental scientists
suggested consumers cut down on sweets by about 50 percent
In total, its estimated that at least $2.2 billion worth of candy will be sold during
Halloween season. That means a lot of extra, nonrecyclable packaging for all those
fun-size candy bars. It also means millions of pounds of cocoa and corn syrup that
needs to be farmed, processed, and shipped.

To take a specific example, consider the Cadbury Dairy Milk bar which received a
"carbon audit" by the British-based organization Carbon Trust. According to the
analysis, a 49-gram chocolate bar has a carbon footprint of about 169 grams a
ratio of 3.45 grams of CO2 for every gram of chocolate. That ratio stacks up pretty
well compared with meat but is a good deal worse than most fruits and vegetables
or bread. Digging down, one interesting result is that the milk used in the candy bar
turns out to be by far the largest component of its carbon footprint suggesting that
dark chocolate may be an environmentally friendlier choice.

THE HALLOWEEN AND THE ENVIRONMENT

While all the tricks and treats are going on, some parents also dread the inevitable
sugar overload to come in the following days or weeks. In addition to sugar, if we
knew more about the ingredients in the candy and the impacts they have, not only
on our childrens teeth and waistlines, but also on the environment, we might step
back and look for options.

Green Halloween, a non-profit, grassroots community movement to create

healthier and more Earth-friendly holidays, provides parents and the community
with healthier or non-food treats to tantalize our kids. Halloween is their first target.
To explore this thought a bit more, lets look at the top selling Halloween candy,
some nutrition information, and the impact on health and the environment.
Halloween is the number one holiday for candy sales. Sales in the U.S. will near
2.1 billion dollars this year! That is up almost three percent since last year, and
there is reason to believe this increase will continue.

Since these candies have similar nutrition profiles, more or less, I picked the Milky
Way bar to observe closer. According to the companys official website, the Classic
Milky Way bar, manufactured by Mars, Inc., has 20 ingredients, listed at the end of
this article. The top three ingredients are different forms of sugar. The Milky Way
also has partially hydrogenated soybean oil, which is a trans fat and soybean oil
itself is a pro-inflammatory oil. Pro means causing inflammation. Trans fats,
discussed in another article on the experts page of the Green Halloween website,
are not healthy for you. They are fats that are created by humans to simulate
natural saturated fats, which are by comparison much healthier for you. Its best
just to avoid trans fats altogether. In fact, as was much publicized, New York City
has banned trans fat use in restaurants, and Seattle is considering it. Why give this
substance to our children?

Moving on down the long list of ingredients, there are several forms of wheat,
which is not harmful for many, but can be a threatening substance for people with
gluten intolerance or Celiac disease, an underdiagnosed allergy to wheat. Artificial
flavors and colors also may pose health concerns. For example, parents with
children in the autistic spectrum or with ADD/ADHD have found that eliminating
artificial colors has lessened symptoms. Even children not diagnosed with autism
or ADD have behavior issues linked to these chemicals. In general, it is unknown
what types of effects, short-term or long-term, these artificial colors and flavors
have on humans. So many natural colorings are available, such as turmeric for
yellow or beets for red, that there is no real reason to knowingly consume or
expose our children to additional chemicals. The other ingredients are
recognizable, but located at the end of the list, indicating smaller quantities.

Each Fun Size bar has 75 calories, while the full-sized bar has 260. But who eats
just one Fun Size bar? Even Mars, Inc. lists two Fun Size bars as one serving size.
The label lists 0 g trans fat. We know this is not true because a major ingredient is
partially hydrogenated soybean oil, which is a trans fat. How do companies get
away with this? The U.S. labeling laws state that if there are less than 0.5 grams of
trans fat per serving, food manufacturers may label it as 0 grams. Heres the catch:
If you eat more than two bars, you are starting to accumulate your intake of trans
fat. Again, this is a synthesized substance that has negative health effects.

There are 20 grams of sugar in two bars. Just as a comparison, there are 17 grams
of natural sugar in a medium pear, plus fiber, antioxidants, vitamins, minerals a
whole lot more nutrition. There are four grams of saturated fat in two Fun Size
bars. That is 20% of the recommended amount of saturated fat for an adult. There
is one gram of protein, and tiny amounts of calcium and iron.
The impact eating candy has on our health is cumulative. One bar wont kill you, of
course, but over time, a habit of a few per day will impact us or our children in
various ways. The first is the most obvious: weight gain. We need to eat only 500

extra calories a day to gain one pound in a week. Doing the math, thats two
regular size Milky Way bars or six and a half Fun Size bars per day. And one
pound per week is 52 pounds per year. Sure, kids burn a lot of calories, but if they
are getting their calories (energy) from things like candy in place of, say, a pear,
they are not getting the nutrients I mentioned above including antioxidants,
minerals, vitamins, and fiber. Candy is empty calories, meaning there are calories
but no, or not many, nutrients.

Second, high sugar content foods contribute to dental caries, more commonly
called cavities. There is more research recently pointing out that the health of teeth
is related to overall health. Third, as any parent knows, some children do not
handle sugar well. You have seen the tantrums or crazy energy erupt from a child
who has recently consumed a significant quantity of sugar. Another implication of
frequent consumption of high sugar containing foods, also called glucose, is a
potential future diagnosis of diabetes. When we eat sugar alone, without
accompanying it with protein and/or high quality fat, our blood sugar levels spike.
This, in turn, causes large amounts of insulin to be released into our blood.
Repetition of this process can lead to the wearing out of our beta cells, the cells
that produce insulin, or to the sensitivity of our bodys cells ability to absorb
glucose. Balancing your food intake, by including protein, healthy fat and
carbohydrates, is important for every meal or snack. Lastly, none of these candies
are organic, which means our children are consuming synthetic pesticides and
fertilizers.
The impact on the environment that this type of food presents, if thats what you
call it, has been well publicized recently. The impacts are many, but Ill just touch
on a few here. Corn syrup or high fructose corn syrup come from corn, which is
most likely genetically modified. Whatever you believe on that topic, the truth is it is
changing our environment toward a future we cannot predict. In addition, the
increase in farmland use for planting corn is depleting our soil of nutrients. Corn is
relatively low on the nutrient density scale, so its value is limited, other than for

corn syrup, livestock feed or ethanol. Yet, because of unsustainable farming

practices, our American farmland has been depleted of nutrients, causing farmers
to use more and more fertilizers and pesticides to achieve profitable yields. These
fertilizers and pesticides run off the farms and into our water ways. The huge algae
explosion in the Caribbean is largely a result of the non-organic farming practices
in the Midwest, where the bulk of commodity foods such as corn, sugar and other
grains are grown. Milk is also an ingredient in these candy bars, and rBGH, or
bovine growth hormone, is abundant in our dairy source. The dairy cattle raising
practices, with centers in California and Wisconsin, also pollute the environment
with potentially toxic substances from the excrement of the cows, not to mention
the methane gas released into the air.

SEVEN TRICKS TO HAVE A GREEN HALLOWEEN

1. Trade costumes with friends. Halloween outfits get worn once or twice for
a few hours. Swapping with a pal means saving moneythe average
consumer spends about $30 per costume, according to the National Retail
Federationand it lessens the clothings environmental impact. Swapping
half the costumes kids wear at Halloween would reduce annual landfill
waste by 6,250 tons, says Corey Colwell-Lipson, founder of Green
Halloween, a non-profit aimed at making Halloween less harmful to the
planet. No need for a big soiree to exchange get-ups; bringing together a
few people works, too. Search National Costume Swap Day for an event
nearby.
2. Cook

up

face

paint

in

your

kitchen. The

Campaign

for

Safe

Cosmeticstested 10 face paints for heavy metals in 2009, and the results
would spook anyone: All contained low levels of lead, and six had allergens
like nickel, chromium, or cobalt. Mixing face paint in your kitchen actually
isnt tough. Start with a thick substance like unscented lotion or pure cocoa
butter, then add natural food coloring or edible elements: blueberries for

blue, beets for red, cinnamon for brown, you get the idea. The Campaign for
Safe Cosmetics offersrecipes. To prevent adverse reactions, always patch
test on the inside of the wearers wrist, Colwell-Lipson recommends.
3. Give candy wrappers a second life. If you simply must eat the candy
Halloween bringsadmittedly, most of us dotry something unique with
those Snickers wrappers. For the craft-minded, take on a project like this
colorful pouch or these cute barrettes. For a simple solution, send the trash
to TerraCycles Candy Wrapper Brigade. The company, which donates two
cents for every waste unit collected, takes wrappers of any size candy and
from any brand. Poof, your garbage becomes a notebook, a tote bag, even
a park bench. Since the Brigade began three years ago, nearly 5.5 million
wrappers have been upcycled instead of heading to a landfill.
4. Get crafty. Spook your neighbors with your spectacular skill. Colwell-Lipson
suggests, for example, making a candy collector from an empty coffee can.
Every year, put the date, what [your child] dressed up as, and a little note
until theyre done trick-or-treating, she says. The craft becomes a family
memento. For decorations, get creative: make ghosts from old sheets, tie
cobwebs with black yarn, or fill empty jars with colored liquid specimens.
5. Stock up on green candy. No need to give up sweets just to lessen your
environmental footprint. Theres candy-with-a-cause sold by companies that
donate a percentage of profits to charity. Or maybe you focus on organic or
fair trade products, which consider environmental impact (the former), as
well as economic and social criteria (the latter). You could ditch the treats
altogether and instead give out non-food itemswhat Colwell-Lipson calls
treasuressomething like seed packets or toys made from recycled
materials.
6. Use the whole pumpkin. Purchase one thats local, preferably from a
nearby farmers market rather than the grocery. Here its helpful to
procrastinate; the longer you wait before getting your pumpkin, the longer
you have before it rots. Jack-o-lantern pumpkinsthose that typically get
carvedare edible, but according to the University of Illinois, a smaller

variety called the sweet pumpkin is best for cooking. When carving the
orange globe, save the innards and seeds for eating, and at the holidays
end, compost the gourd. (Check out this Audubon blog post for more tips on
using the whole pumpkin.)
7. Toss out routine. Try reverse trick-or-treating, a Global Exchange program
where children give out fair-trade candy or a note explaining the initiative. Or
plan a progressive Halloween with stops at several homes. Go to each
house and have one activity and one treat, says Colwell-Lipson. For
example, drink apple cider and play pass the pumpkin, then move on to the
next place for different food and fun.

CONCLUSION

As we can see there exist many ways in which we can generate pollution not only
during the Halloween holidays, also in many other celebrations all along the year. I
think that the more important is because of the package of all the products that we
use every day because there are candies that have a double package and all this
materials went to the garbage and not all of the are recycled, and moreover a lot of
people let the garbage of the candies in the street, they dont take them to the
trash, so this can produce problems in the drainage and we it rains there are a lot
of flood.
In the other part a lot of people buys costumes for their children and almost all the
time these clothes are used only once and after that its throwing away to the
garbage. I think that we must think pretty well how we are going to celebrate this
Halloween.