Photo: “Cocoa Beans” credit Rainforest Alliance

With Halloween just around the corner, it’s time to stock up on chocolates and sweet treats for the inevitable rush of trick-or-treaters. Ensure your holiday is scary in spirit, but easy on the environment with the Rainforest Alliance’s five tips to green your Halloween.

1)      Choose Rainforest Alliance Certified™ chocolate, such as by Endangered Species, for Halloween treats. Farmed on over 18 million acres of tropical land, some five million farmers rely on cocoa for their livelihoods. Unfortunately, many of these clear forests to expand their cocoa-growing lands. By choosing chocolate that features the green frog seal, you’re rewarding farmers that protect tropical forests and support the well-being of workers and local communities.

2)      Make terrifyingly tasty treats with Rainforest Alliance Certified chocolate, bananas and coffee. Check out our “Haunted Halloween Recipes” and visit our Shop the Frog page to find certified products near you.

3)      Teach your kids where their favorite chocolate treats come from and how they impact people, wildlife and the planet. Visit the Rainforest Alliance’s Kids’ Corner and play the online game Track it Back, to learn where chocolate comes from, where cocoa is grown and how it is harvested! Also visit our virtual rainforest, “Living in the Chocó Forests of Ecuador: The Chachi Cocoa Farmers.” (Brush up on your own knowledge about cocoa farming here.)

4)      Ensure your little trick-or-treater collects candy with a reusable bag.

5)      Instead of driving, walk your tick-or-treater around your local neighborhood. By walking, you are helping to save emissions, while also saving on your gas bill! It will also help to burn off the extra candy calories!

Keep it up! Supporting an eco-friendly lifestyle should be a daily event, not an occasional act. With a little thought, and some guidance from the Rainforest Alliance, you can easily apply these green Halloween tips to your everyday life.

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The Rainforest Alliance works with people whose livelihoods depend on the land, helping them transform the way they grow food, harvest wood and host travelers. From large multinational corporations to small, community-based cooperatives, businesses and consumers worldwide are involved in the Rainforest Alliance’s efforts to bring responsibly produced goods and services to a global marketplace where the demand for sustainability is growing steadily. For more information, visit www.rainforest-alliance.org.

By Wendy

With Halloween at the end of the month, it’s time to start stocking up on Halloween candy to give the kids that come by the house. With all the different candies out there to choose from, how do you find the healthiest options? Here are 5 healthy Halloween treat alternatives:

1- LÄRABAR bars: these bars have a delicious blend of unsweetened fruits, nuts and spices. Each flavor contains no more than nine ingredients, so you know that they keep it simple. Apple Pie provides 1 full serving of fruit and 5 grams of fiber. Not too sweet, and spiced with cinnamon and raisins, Apple Pie also has almonds, walnuts and natural chewy goodness.

2- Organic Dark Chocolate Bug Bites: Each of these squares contains a fun and educational insect trading card. They have 70% cocoa content and is certified organic, vegan, gluten-free, and kosher. Another great thing about this chocolate is sourced from ethically traded cacao farms, which ensures fair trade, responsible labor practices and sustainable farming.

3- Unreal 54: similar to chocolate covered peanuts, these sweets delights contain no corn syrup, no partially hydrogenated oils, no artificial ingredients, no genetically modified organisms (GMOs), no preservatives, and a low glycemic index.

4- Surf Sweets Gummy Bears: I’m a huge fan of gummy bears, so it’s great to find a healthier version of these sweet little gummy bears. Surf Sweets Gummy Bears are made with organic fruit juice and organic sweeteners. Also contains 100% vitamin C per serving. No corn syrups of GMOs.

5- Equal Exchange Organic & Fairly Traded Dark Chocolate Minis: Equal Exchange minis are made with cacao from the farmer co-operatives CONACADO, in the Dominican Republic, and CACVRA, in Peru, and the fairly traded organic sugar comes from co-operatives in Paraguay.  These delicious, bite-sized Fair Trade chocolates are the way to go! Made of 555% cocoa content, they are also vegan, soy- and gluten-free.

So stock up on some of these delicious treats! And if you don’t happen to give them all away on Halloween, they make great treats for lunch boxes and mid-day pick me ups. What’s your favorite treat?

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Wendy Yu is a digital marketing professional living in New York City. When she’s not using the power of social media to share ideas on how to be more environmentally friendly, she is exploring the city, trying local foods, and learning more about how she can reduce her carbon footprint.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Green Halloween® or our partners.

Guest post

Halloween should be fun, right? Unfortunately, a scary reality is that one of the biggest nights for the chocolate industry supports a system that relies on forced child labor on many West African cocoa farms. But you can do something to help stop such practices and still enjoy Halloween.

This October, families, organizations, and businesses across the U.S. can help children forced to work on West African cocoa farms by participating in the 5th annual Reverse Trick-or-Treating campaign. By handing out organic, Fair Trade chocolates from Equal Exchange with attached informational cards when they go trick-or-treating, participants can bring critically important attention to the thousands of children who are trafficked and forced to work in horrible conditions on West African cocoa farms.

This year’s Reverse Trick-or-Treating program marks the 10^th anniversary of the September, 2001, signing of the Harkin-Engel Protocol that called for an end to the worst forms of child labor in the cocoa supply chains of the major chocolate companies. The campaign to raise awareness that there is a Fair Trade alternative to child labor was launched in 2007, two years after the deadline had passed for signatories to end the worst forms of child labor. Ten years after the protocol’s signing, most of its conditions have still not been met.

Equal Exchange knows there’s a better way to go and instead sources its Fair Trade and organic cocoa from farms in the Dominican Republic, Panama, Peru, and Ecuador. The vanilla from Madagascar and sugar from Paraguay for Equal Exchange’s chocolate are also certified Fair Trade and organic.

Contributed by: Kelsie Evans, Equal Exchange Chocolate Products Coordinator

On Valentine’s Day, when we’re enjoying the chocolate given to us as gifts by the people we love, most of us are not aware that there’s a side to chocolate that’s not too sweet.

That’s why Green America has launched a National Week of Action, February 4-14, 2011, for screenings of the film The Dark Side of Chocolate.

During the week of action, Green America is also asking us to send a special Valentine’s Day card to Hershey’s CEO, David West, asking him to “have a heart”, eliminating child and forced-labor by shifting to Fair Trade Certified cocoa. Further, Green America has a similar online letter-writing campaign, asking Hershey’s to commit to sourcing 100% Fair Trade Certified cocoa by 2012.

What Fair Trade Certified chocolate means:

• Chocolate was produced without human trafficking and without forced or child labor
• Chocolate was produced under standards that protect environmental and human rights.

To get involved in the cause, gather friends and family together to host a screening of the The Dark Side of Chocolate. Get your screening kit here.

Blogger Laurali Star can be found on The Damsel in the Attic.

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.