Halloween has come and gone. Time to put away all the decorations and save your costumes for next year’s costume swap.

The only obstacle standing is the heap of leftover candy. What do you do with it? Better yet, what can you do?

Instead of just tossing, or keeping around to consume, we’ve prepared a list of unusual ways to reuse and recycle unwanted sweets.

1. Compost

Instead of tossing Halloween treats in the trash, why not “recycle” by composting? If you have curbside yardwaste/food composting, just unwrap candy and toss in the bin. If you have an off-the ground compost bin, you can also include leftovers there. Composting candy in a ground-heap compost may attract pests, so another idea is to push pieces, one at a time, into the soil of houseplants.

For additional information, check out these these resources. Happy composting!

2. Halloween candy buy back

Did you know there’s a program that actually buys YOUR leftover candies and uses them in care packages for oversea soldiers? What a great idea! It’s called Halloween candy buy back and they provide the candy for Operation Gratitude. If you have the leftover candy to spare, why not register with them and make someone else’s life a little sweeter?

Operation Gratitude received and shipped out 60 tons of candy last year and is hoping to be able to ship 60,000 care packages this year. Check out their fantastic video if you’re still not convinced!

3. Candy experiments

(Loralee of CandyExperiments.com has kindly agreed to writing a (forthcoming) guest post for our blog but we’ve decided to include her in this post anyway!) You might wonder, what could candy experiments possibly mean? Well, it sounds exactly as it is! Making experiments with candy. This provides a fun activity for everyone in your household and who doesn’t love a little science experiment? Grab your flasks and goggles folks because you never know what chemical reactions will result in mixing these candies together! Have fun!

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 Monday, November 1st, 2010 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Activities, Fun ideas, Other great initiatives, Treats and Treasures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.