Copyright Chicago Tribune
With the Halloween season now over, Joe Fidler of Aurora decided last Saturday morning it was time his family’s pumpkins found a new home. “This is a great. It’s going to be fun to just smash, and it’s better than throwing them away in the trash,” Fidler said as he and his two sons got ready to break up some pumpkins during a pumpkin smash event Saturday in Aurora. “We live just around the corner and this was nice and convenient for us. We’re going to take these bats they gave us, warm up and here we go.” The event was part of the annual pumpkin recycling efforts offered by the Addison-based SCARCE group, an environmental education nonprofit that began organizing and promoting pumpkin smash events in Illinois in 2014. SCARCE founder and Director Kay McKeen said there were four locations this year in Kane County for the effort including sites in St. Charles, Geneva, Aurora and Hampshire. “We started this in 2014 and we wrote a law for the state of Illinois to allow for special events composting collection,” she said. “We started with three towns in DuPage County and we have 24 towns this year in DuPage and 115 that we know of around the country.” The pumpkin smash events are designed to reduce the number of pumpkins ending up in landfills. Instead, the pumpkins are broken apart and used as compost. In Kane County, McKeen said pumpkin collections have been strong including at the Geneva pumpkin smash site at Peck and Bricher roads. “Geneva last year had the record in terms of pounds collected,” she said. “Towns don’t always tell us how many pounds they get. Some count the number of pumpkins, some count the number of cars, some give us the weight. Since 2014, we’ve composted over 1,418 tons. This is such a good nutrient for soil and you don’t need as many fertilizers or pesticides or maybe not any at all. We’ve learned over the years that soil enriched with food scraps also holds more water which reduces flooding.” The Aurora site this year for the pumpkin recycling was at a facility owned by ALDI at 1245 Corporate Blvd. It is the second year the site has been involved in the pumpkin recycling effort. “We’re really grateful that ALDI is doing this. It’s kind of cool because they sell pumpkins and now, they are helping to get them back,” McKeen said. Fidler was at the Aurora site where Emily Wiora of ALDI was overseeing the pumpkin smash which took place in a parking lot and a grassy area near a dumpster where scraps were later collected. “I’m the director of sustainability and this is the second time we have had this here,” she said. “We encouraged all of our employees and people in the community to come out and recycle their pumpkins. We understand the value of keeping these out of landfills and we had the space to do this. We know we had a successful event and we wanted to do it again. Last year we got over 100 pumpkins.” Ashley Donaldson and her daughter Bryce were on hand and said “with everything going on in the environment, everybody is just looking for a way to keep the Earth green.” Bryce Donaldson, 10, was using an aluminum baseball bat to break apart a pumpkin at the event and said she “was ready to hit some more (pumpkins) when they come.” “I think learning about this and recycling is a good thing,” she said. The Geneva site for the pumpkin smash effort was located at the Community Gardens in the city and was considerably busier than the Aurora location as staff there said a total of 716 pumpkins had been brought in during the event’s first 90 minutes on Saturday. Kaitlin Meno of Geneva and her family were among those dropping off and smashing pumpkins in Geneva on Saturday and said this was “the first time we’ve come to this, but based on today, we’re definitely going to come again.” “We always, up until now, composted our pumpkins at home,” she said. “We brought four pumpkins. This was worth the trip.” And she said she learned something too – that “pumpkins were easier to break than I thought.” David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.
