Are Halloween pumpkins a problem for the planet?
Halloween pumpkins account for 18,000 tonnes of food waste each year. Image: Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale
Stay up to date:
Agriculture, Food and Beverage
For many, carving ghoulish faces into pumpkins is an October tradition. But it could be creating a nightmare for the environment.
Every year, 10 million pumpkins are grown in the UK. Of those, 95% are used at Halloween and then thrown away - creating 18,000 tonnes of food waste.
It’s a similar story in the United States, where most of the 900,000 tonnes of pumpkin produced annually will be trashed, rather than used as food or composted.
That feeds into the 1.3 billion tonnes of global food waste created each year. Fruit and vegetables have the highest rate of waste of any food.
Once Halloween is over, there’s still plenty you can do with a pumpkin. There are dozens of different recipes – from the famous pumpkin pie popular in the US at Thanksgiving, to soup, bread, curry and cake.
Pumpkin seeds are believed to have a range of health benefits – helping with sleep, blood sugar levels, and cholesterol.
Meanwhile, craft beer producer Toast Ale has come up with a recipe for home-brewed pumpkin beer that also makes use of leftover bread.
It’s not just food waste that concerns scientists. According to the US Department of Energy, pumpkins that end up in landfill will decompose and eventually emit methane – a greenhouse gas with more than 20 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide.
What’s the World Economic Forum doing about climate change?
Instead of creating emissions, pumpkins and other holiday waste could be turned into energy via anaerobic digestion, where microorganisms are used to break down organic waste materials in an air-sealed tank that’s heated up to accelerate processing.
The resulting biogas can be used to generate electricity that powers homes, runs vehicles, and produces heat.
Don't miss any update on this topic
Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.
License and Republishing
World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.
Related topics:
The Agenda Weekly
A weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda
You can unsubscribe at any time using the link in our emails. For more details, review our privacy policy.
More on Industries in DepthSee all
Guy Grainger
September 18, 2024
Joe Myers and Madeleine North
September 3, 2024
David Elliott
August 19, 2024
Matthew Van Niekerk
August 12, 2024
Gabi Thesing, Ian Shine and David Elliott
July 25, 2024
Mandy Chan and Daniel Boero Vargas
June 25, 2024