How to reduce pumpkin waste: don’t throw away your pumpkins after Halloween!
Each year Americans throw ± 1 BIllION pounds of pumpkins away, ending up in landfills and creating lots of harmful greenhouse gases.
It’s easy to forget that Halloween pumpkins are edible! But they are all edible and there are a lot of other ways to use them besides eating them.
The majority of people don’t actually want to waste their pumpkins, they simply don’t know what to do with them. In this post I am going to share different ideas that you can do with your Halloween pumpkins, whether you carved them or just bought them as decorations.
We can see most of people Halloween’s content online full of pumpkins, butternuts and other squashes. They are indeed really cute, but I was really surprised when some friends told me that after Halloween, they just threw them away in the woods or garbage.
Such a shame because all of these last way longer than that. I actually buy different varieties when autumn starts and keep them until the first weeks of winter.
How you can avoid the waste?
First of all when you carve your pumpkins you can keep the seeds and roasted them or use them to plant them.
If you want to roast them: you just need a little vegetable oil (I always use olive oil) salt and paprika, and bake it for 15 min.
Other roasted seeds flavor ideas are: honey and cinnamon, turmeric and curry or garlic and parmesan.
Second you can freeze them and save them for later.
* I make small portions so I can easily use them for different recipes like waffles or cookies.
* Or you can cook it: make purée, pumpkin risotto, soups, pumpkin butter, salads…
* You don’t want to cook them? Then make pumpkin facemasks or use them as bird feeders adding the seeds inside.
* If you just used pumpkins as decor just keep them a bit longer! Biggest ones can be cut in portions and freezed (or make purée and freeze) and cook smaller ones one by one till you’re done!
Thanksgiving is the best occasion to reuse your pumpkins, you can make beautiful centerpieces. Some people empty the pumpkin and squashes and use them as candle holders.
Lastly: donate them!
If you don’t want to throw them away but don’t want to use them, why you don’t donate them to charity associations ? That would be a great way to help other people.
As you can see, there are lots of options to reduce pumpkin waste and it’s a movement that we need to join as Halloween is a global event and nowadays it’s not just one country using a few pumpkins from autumn harvests, but a global event producing a dangerous amount of harmful greenhouse gases.
So let’s turn the tables on the planet and have better consumer habits!
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