Guest Post by Jonathan Collins. Jonathan is the grown-ups community manager for www.minimonos.com, a virtual world for kids, focused on sustainability, generosity, community and fun!

We love Green Halloween^®. Love the engagement. Love putting the eek! into being eco-friendly. And love building healthier, planet-friendly communities by mainstreaming green thinking.

Our connection with Green Halloween came about after one of the kids on MiniMonos (a virtual world for kids) wrote a blog telling us about making a recycled costume as part of a school wearable art project.

Using discarded felt-tip pens and other found objects she created a truly fantastic costume  and learned a lot in the process.

Then another of our MiniMonos kids posted a photo of a robot he’d made from recycled materials. Very cool stuff.

These kids showed such initiative, and got great feedback from other kids on MiniMonos we were inspired! We wanted to follow up and build on the idea. So this Halloween we’re holding a huge Green Halloween costume competition on MiniMonos. There’s already a buzz of excitement about it.

In our Green Halloween^® costume competition kids are encouraged to get creative, use swapped costumes or create their own recycled masterpieces. They can then post photos of their Green Halloween costumes online and there are some wicked prizes up for grabs for the best of them.

Makes good sense on so many levels. Once we’d tuned in to GreenHalloween.org and discovered that $6 billion is spent on Halloween costumes, candy & accessories each year (most of which is either unhealthy or made from unsustainable materials and winds up in landfills afterwards) we wanted to do our bit to help green up the spooky season.

Not only is it better for the planet, it’s loads more fun making your own costumes anyway! We’re using Halloween as an opportunity to think again, and to get creative.

I can’t wait to see the photos that come in. Go Go Green Halloween!

Green Halloween® is a nationwide non-profit initiative started by mother-daughter team Corey Colwell-Lipson and Lynn Colwell. In 2010, Green Halloween became a program of EcoMom® Alliance and has events in cities across the U.S.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 12th, 2010 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Activities, Contests, Fun ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.