Years ago, when I was in middle school, my two best friends and I dressed up as political figures for Halloween. Emily went as John Kerry, Marjorie went as George Bush, and I went as an undecided voter. After years dressed up as chefs, bakers, bumblebees, and a dump truck (don’t ask, kids are so weird), this Halloween setup had just the right frisson of danger that 3 tweens living in a highly liberal DC neighborhood needed. 

(FYI this is not a political post! I’ll get to the sustainability stuff in a sec.)

It must have been right before the 2004 election because boy did we rake in the candy. Block by block we got Snickers by the fistfuls. We’d knock on the door, do the whole trick or treat spiel, the adults would unfailingly say “now that is scary” while locking eyes with Marjorie behind her Bush mask as if she were a massive demon skeleton, and then give me and Emily all the good candy. Marjorie mostly got Necco wafers.

As the night wore on and our pillowcases of candy grew heavier, we started to feel bad for Marjorie. Her pillowcase was so light.

We decided that, despite our parents’ wishes, we would have to stop at the two confirmed Republican houses within a mile radius (in a neighborhood full of lobbyists, you knew who used to work for which senator). Whereupon the owners would again lock eyes with Bush/tiny little blonde Marjorie, shake her little hand, pour the whole bowl of candy in her pillowcase, and then shut the door and turn out all the lights.

So all three of us did all right, candy-wise, by the time we collapsed at home on the living room floor and started sorting and trading. 

I remember much of that night so acutely: 

What I don’t remember was what happened to the thousands of candy wrappers our sugared-up political smart-asses left behind. I imagine we stuffed them in one of the pillowcases and went to bed, assuming it would be dealt with by an adult who cared if the remnants of a Kit Kat were accidentally pulverized into the carpet. 

But I’d also bet if I went into my childhood bedroom and rummaged in the closet, I’d find a bunch of wrappers still at the bottom of my red LL Bean backpack, along with a moldy clementine and my eighth grade earth science notes that I knew even then were of no use.

Fast forward 20 years — almost to the day, yiiiikes — and I’ve gone down a rabbit hole about what happens to those wrappers. Here’s what I found:

Candy wrappers can’t be recycled by most municipal systems. I mean, they can be recycled, but they're so small and can gunk up the machines, so it’s not profitable for most recycling operations. 

Which is a bummer because Americans buy roughly 600 million pounds (and ~ $3 billion) of candy every Halloween. That is roughly 16 billion fun-size Snickers bars (way more than even Marjorie got). So it would be nice if they all didn’t end up in landfills or LL Bean backpacks. 

(PS I called Rivanna Authorities, the org that runs Cville’s recycling programs, and their admin office was like yeah that is trash we don’t recycle that. So back to square one.)

There are other ways to recycle candy wrappers. Your kid’s school system may already have a recycling program in place, and actually candy giant/pet food parent company Mars used to run something called the Trick or Trash recycling program where you could collect all your wrappers and mail them to a recycling company for free. Wish that program was still alive 🪦

But like any good Halloween tale, you don’t have to be alive to be a hero.

Which leads me to TerraCycle, the private recycling company that started out in the early 2000s by recycling worm poop, no joke, but now mainly helps companies and individuals recycle those hard-to-recycle things (wonder if I can say recycle again in this sentence) like shampoo bottles, lip balm tubes, Brita water filters, baby cheese casings, and you guessed it candy bar wrappers. 

The actual recycling science is way beyond my English major paygrade, but essentially all those products are sorted, melted into plastic pellets, and then mainly used to create other plastic products like park benches and bike racks. This is much better than being tossed in a landfill or set on fire. 

(PS I highly recommend the How I Built This podcast episode on TerraCycle’s founder.)

The company has a great list of over 100 free programs you can participate in to recycle, for example, your bread bags, your razors, and your cigarette butts (Lawton, this is aimed directly at you). You can earn points the more you recycle, which you can then donate at the charity or school of your choice.

TerraCycle’s Halloween candy recycling bags & boxes are, alas, not free.

I ponied up $43 for an official bag — another example of how many sustainable decisions aren’t yet aligned with financial decisions, but in comparison to the $$$ we had to shell out for the actual candy, it was a drop in the bucket. The bag arrived in 3 biz days and it looks GREAT, although it is much smaller than I thought it would be (did not check the dimensions before I purchased, to be fair).

I’m writing this Halloween-themed post a week early because 1) I didn’t want all the candy jokes to go stale before I got here, and 2) I don’t imagine G and I will eat so many Twizzlers that we’ll need the whole TerraCycle bag. We’ll probably have room for like one or two more pieces.

🚨 So if you’re trick or treating near the Fry Spring Beach Club in Charlottesville next Thursday, come visit our house and drop off your wrappers. Also you should come visit because, as of writing this, we haven’t yet eaten all the good candy.

Definitely check out TerraCycle’s website (they have boxes that are bigger!), but there are also a ton of other ways to recycle your stuff, especially in bulk rather than one by one.

Here are a few goodies where you’ll get some treats back:

There are also a ton of brand-specific recycling options that give you cash or rewards back — like for Patagonia, Madewell, and Apple — the problem right now is that pretty much all these recycling options are, much like my 2004 floor candy fiefdoms, not unified.