More than a fifth of what ends up in Aberdeenshire's kerbside black-lid bins is food waste; this spikes across Halloween when carved pumpkins are thrown away.
This Halloween, Aberdeenshire Council is asking residents to recycle pumpkins using their free food waste caddies and to consider “no-carve” decorating to help cut waste from food that is bought but never eaten.
Recycling leftovers using Aberdeenshire Council’s free food-waste caddies helps the environment in several ways:
- It supports sustainable farming by turning food waste into digestate, which becomes fertiliser for agriculture;
- The biogases created from the recycled food waste are used for heat, power, or even biofuel for vehicles; and
- Some food waste is also converted into compost for local farms.
To help reduce food waste, environmental campaign group Hubbub suggests a “no-carve” approach decorating pumpkins—keeping them fresh so they can be eaten after Halloween.
Some decorative ideas include toothpicks studded with all kinds of sweets in the shape of teeth or eyes, adding colour with edible paints, or glamming them up with gems, beads, stickers, or ribbons.
Cllr Alan Turner, Chair of the council’s Infrastructure Services Committee, said: "Halloween is a great time to be creative — not just with costumes, but with pumpkins too. Decorating without carving keeps them fresher for longer, giving families more opportunities to get the kids involved with cooking up some seldom enjoyed pumpkin-based recipes together after Halloween.”
Pumpkin recycling tips:
- Remove any decorations before recycling to help avoid contamination
- Chop up old pumpkins into your free food waste caddy
- Whole, still fresh, pumpkins, can be placed on top of your food bin for recycling.
Food waste is collected each week from the kerbside and residents can get an indoor and outdoor food waste caddy for free from their local recycling centre or service point if theirs is broken or if they need more than one.
Food waste bag liners for the caddies can also be collected from household recycling centres, council libraries, or you can tie one to your outdoor food caddie and the collection crew will leave you a new roll where they have stock available.
Reducing food waste and recycling instead not only helps the environment — it helps to subsidise the costs of disposing of non-recyclable waste, which have been increasing steadily over recent years.