While “spooky season” brings great fun, Halloween traditions generate a frightening amount of plastic waste each year. According to industry data, American consumers purchase more than $3.1 billion worth of Halloween candy each year, and the majority of it arrives in packaging that cannot be recycled. When the parties are over and trick or treating is done, pesky piles of candy wrappers end up in the trash.
Most candy wrappers are tricky to recycle because they are made from a mix of materials, including polypropylene, aluminum foil, and paper. To avoid being haunted by the remnants of these bite-sized, individually wrapped treats, recycler/upcycler TerraCycle is offering its Zero Waste Boxes for convenient recycling of all brands of flexible plastic-based candy packaging and wrappers, which are not typically recycled through curbside recycling services.
“In North America, TerraCycle has recycled approximately 15 million candy wrappers and snack packaging (and counting!) through its Zero Waste Box Program to date,” says Tom Szaky, founder and CEO of TerraCycle. “It’s pretty scary to think that otherwise this waste would all go to landfill.”
According to TerraCycle, the Zero Waste Boxes are simple to use. When placed in public spaces such as schools, community centers, local businesses, and neighborhood parks, Candy and Snack Wrappers Zero Waste Boxes encourage people to responsibly dispose of their wrappers instead of tossing items on the ground. And for a special Halloween treat, TerraCycle created spooky versions of the Halloween Treat Wrappers Zero Waste Box and Halloween Treat Wrappers Zero Waste Pouch, available for a limited time only.
When full, the boxes and pouches can be returned to TerraCycle for processing, and the collected waste will be cleaned, melted, and remolded into pellets that can be used to make new products.
TerraCycle created the Zero Waste Box program to provide solutions for hard-to-recycle waste that cannot be recycled through standard municipal recycling. PW
