October is winding down.

Last Friday, my husband took the kid to pick out a Halloween costume. This is the first year I can remember where she opted for a store bought creation. She had originally planned on being a Monarch butterfly, but the store didn’t have one in her size. She tried on a bunch of costumes until she found one that fit, which she could live with. It’s a character from a movie. ‘Nough said.

I read a distressing statistic the other day. About store bought costumes. Did you know that 6,250 TONS of landfill waste is from used Halloween costumes? That’s a lot of trash.

I’m a saver, a recycler and a composter. I still have costumes I created in the late 80s. I couldn’t possibly fit into any of them, but they’re not in a land fill. One of my kid’s earliest chores was taking the kitchen scraps to the compost pile out back. A chore she still does to this day. I tried to teach by example, by using as few resources as possible and reusing the ones I had on hand as many ways as possible before disposing of them. Somewhere along the line, it got lost in translation. My child contributes more trash to the landfill every week than my husband and I combined.

I know there are kids her age who care about the environment and being frugal. I read about them in the paper and on the internet. It worries me though, that they may be in the minority and the current generation of children are even less concerned with what’s going on around them then the children of my own generation. According to the United Nations Population Division, the world’s human population will hit 7,000,000,000 on October 31. That’s a billion more than just 11 years ago. Talk about scary. That many people use a LOT of resources and make a lot of trash.

Are your kids wearing a homemade or store bought costume? Where will it end up the week after Halloween?

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