Don’t toss your pumpkin after Halloween. Do this instead.

Every year, Americans buy tens of millions of decorative pumpkins to carve, paint and display for Halloween. When you throw those pumpkins out, they w...

Every year, Americans buy tens of millions of decorative pumpkins to carve, paint and display for Halloween. When you throw those pumpkins out, they wind up in the landfill, where they rot and release methane, an extra-powerful planet-warming gas.

How scary might those pumpkin emissions be?

In 2022, the United States harvested about 2 billion pounds of pumpkins destined to be sold whole (not processed, canned or made into pie or bread) according to data from the Agriculture Department. Assuming those pumpkins eventually made their way to a landfill, they would release about 7,500 tons of methane, according to Robert Czubaszek, an environmental scientist at the Bialystok University of Technology in Poland. That’s the greenhouse gas equivalent of more than 45,000 cars, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

But there are better - and more fun - ways to dispose of your jack-o-lanterns this year. You can compost them, smash them or feed them to farm animals, so long as you haven’t doused your pumpkins in bleach or paint.

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