Compost Your Jack-O'-Lantern

Instead of tossing your jack-o'-lantern in the trash, recycle it with other biodegradable food scraps and yard waste in a backyard compost bin.

If you're unable to compost, check to see if your green-waste hauler allows fruit and vegetable trimmings to be placed in your green-waste container.

If you compost or green-cycle your jack-o'-lantern this year, you'll keep 10 to 20 pounds of waste out of the landfill. And even though pumpkins are biodegradable, almost nothing that's biodegradable breaks down under the dry and oxygen-deprived conditions of a landfill.

If just 10 percent of all pumpkins sold this year were composted instead of being thrown out with the garbage, 100 million pounds of waste could be kept from the nation's landfills annually. The effect of this level of waste reduction would be as though nearly 42,000 U.S. households stopped producing garbage altogether.

EPA
National Agricultural Statistics Service, USDA