Halloween pumpkins turn into compost

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This article was published 06/11/2021 (1811 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Great Pumpkin may not have risen from a patch on Halloween this year, but it may have fallen from the top floor of a shopping mall parkade.

An initiative to divert jack-o’-lantern remains from the garbage dump, by sending them to be composted, was held on Saturday, with dozens of Winnipeggers going to the second floor of one of the Polo Park parkades to toss their leftover gourds into a dump truck parked on ground level.

Christa Brown went to the event with her husband Scott, and two children, five-year-old Alex and three-year-old Andrea, and said the kids loved everything about it.

“It was a really good way to get kids excited about something after Halloween,” said Brown shortly after the four pumpkins she had carved — one with a cat face, another with a spider, and others with happy and scary faces — went over the side of the parkade to go ‘splat’ into the back of a truck below.

“My daughter really wanted to throw the cat one and her brother let her,” she added.

It was the first year the family had carved pumpkins and Brown says they will be back to the event next year.

“My son had come home and said ‘can we carve a pumpkin?’ This was two days before Halloween, but we did it,” she said.

“I know there are some (websites) which said take your pumpkin to a park, but then (Manitoba) Conservation posted don’t put them in provincial parks. I saw this and thought it was a great idea.”

Karrie Blackburn, of Compost Winnipeg, a social initiative of the Green Action Centre, which organized the event, said within the first hour of its planned four hours on Saturday one of their two trucks was already close to being filled with the orange discards from Halloween and autumn displays by residents.

“Pumpkins are the only crop which is grown just to be thrown away,” said Blackburn.

“But they can be composted. You just have to chop it up, add some leaves, and you can even compost them at home. But, if you can’t, you can take it here.”

Blackburn said the two trucks they were using together would be able to divert about 6,350 kilograms of pumpkin waste at a time from the landfill to instead become livestock feed or compost.

In the end, five truckloads of pumpkins were collected representing about 3,400 gourds.

“If it doesn’t have wax in it it should be fine for animals,” she said.

“But there are a lot of pumpkins coming here which haven’t even been carved.”

In fact, pumpkins are a big annual problem for landfills. Out of the 80,000 tonnes of pumpkins annually grown in Canada, with 66 per cent of them sold to consumers, most of the ones either carved for Halloween or put out for an autumn display aren’t turned into pies or something else that can be eaten, but instead just tossed into the garbage and sent to the landfill.

“This is an immense amount of organic waste,” said Blackburn.

“No matter where these pumpkins (here) end up now they will be staying out of the landfill.”

Missed seeing your pumpkin go splat? You can still drop it off to be composted until end of day Tuesday at five drop off locations: 90 Ashland Ave., 1885 Chancellor Dr., 1188 Dakota St., 218 Antrim Rd., and 210 Rita St.

Pumpkins can also be put in the same collection bag used for leaf and yard waste collection by the city.

 

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca