How to Treat, Not Trick, the Planet With Your Halloween Candy
Allyson Chiu | October 14, 2022 | The Washington Post
With just weeks until many neighborhood streets are flooded with candy-seeking trick-or-treaters, environmentalists and sustainability experts say you should consider taking a second look at the sweet treats you might be planning to hand out — or eat — this Halloween.
While chocolate is a crowd-pleaser, the ubiquitous candy “has some pretty close associations with two of the biggest environmental crises that we face right now, and that’s the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis,” says John Buchanan, vice president of sustainable production for Conservation International.
What’s more, much of the individually wrapped candies plucked from bowls at parties or hauled home at the end of the night contribute to the spooky holiday’s waste problem.
“Halloween should really be called Plasticween,” says Judith Enck, a former senior Environmental Protection Agency official under Barack Obama who now heads the Beyond Plastics advocacy organization. Although costumes and decorations are major sources of plastic, the overabundance of non-recyclable candy wrappers is also cause for concern. Broadly, Enck says, the holiday “is a plastic and solid waste disaster.”
But Enck and other experts emphasize that axing the holiday isn’t the answer. “I would vigorously oppose canceling Halloween,” she says.
“I have very fond memories of trick-or-treating as a child. My kids had wonderful times trick-or-treating,” adds Carolyn Dimitri, an applied economist and associate professor of food studies at New York University. “It’s our culture, our custom — we give candy on Halloween.”
So, if you’re among the roughly two-thirds of Americans planning to pass out candy this year, here’s how experts recommend treating — rather than tricking — the planet with your choices.
Understand the impacts of candy
“It’s important for consumers, with any product that they buy, that they educate themselves about where it comes from and how it’s made and the impact of the product on the environment and the social implications of it,” says Alexander Ferguson, vice president for communications and membership at the nonprofit World Cocoa Foundation.
The environmental, climate and social impacts of popular candy products are largely associated with two common ingredients, experts say: cocoa and palm oil — both of which can be found in chocolate.
“In terms of sustainability, the biggest problems in confectionery are in chocolate,” says Etelle Higonnet, an environmental and human rights expert who helped create the first environmental scorecard for chocolate.
Companies typically source cocoa and palm oil from tropical areas often inhabited by people in less economically-developed communities, Dimitri says. According to some estimates, about 70 percent of the world’s cocoa comes from West Africa while around 90 percent of the world’s palm oil trees are grown on a handful of islands in Indonesia and Malaysia.
Producing cocoa and palm oil has led to the deforestation of critical rainforests, which poses problems for climate and biodiversity, Buchanan says. West Africa’s Ivory Coast, for instance, has lost 80 percent of its forests since 1970.
Preserving these rainforests can help the world meet its goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to preindustrial levels, he adds.
“Deforestation and land use change are such huge drivers of emissions globally,” Buchanan says. “Even if we had a 100 percent perfect solution to green energy and … decarbonization, if you decarbonize the economy tomorrow, we still have to take nature into account if we are to stay below 1.5 degrees of warming. The global community must address both fossil fuel emissions and emissions associated with loss of natural areas and land use.”
Cocoa and palm oil are also linked to human rights issues, including forced labor and child labor.
Aside from taking steps to provide living wages to cocoa farmers, many of whom have been paid about $1 a day or less, major chocolate manufacturers such as Mars, Nestlé and Hershey have pledged to stop using cocoa harvested by children. But difficulties tracing cocoa back to farms means companies often can’t guarantee that their chocolate is produced without child labor, The Washington Post’s Peter Whoriskey and Rachel Siegel reported in 2019.
The chocolate industry is working on achieving better rates of traceability, or knowing where a product comes from, Ferguson says. “That sounds like a very simple thing, but actually it’s quite a hard thing to do when you’ve got many smallholder farmers and a long and complicated supply chain.”
Additionally, poverty underpins many of the labor issues affecting those involved in the production of chocolate. Farmers often have to use their own children, because they can’t afford laborers.
“People tend to draw conclusions about the use of children in agriculture, and I think it’s important to keep in mind that for a lot of families there is not any other option,” Dimitri says.
