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Here’s why you should never throw your carved Halloween pumpkin in a landfill — and what you can do with it instead.

“One big misconception we hear a lot in the community is that people think that all organic material, like pumpkins, just break down in the landfill. Landfills are actually designed to not allow things to break down in a way that composting allows,” said Udara Abeysekera, ReThink Waste manager at The Environmental Center, according to Source Weekly.

Tossing jack-o-lanterns in landfills generates harmful methane gas, but there’s a better way to get a second life out of your decorative gourds.

More than one billion pounds of pumpkins are grown in the U.S. every year, and after they’ve been used for Halloween decorations, pies, and jack-o’-lanterns, millions of them—large, mini, orange, white, heirloom—will end up in a landfill.

From October to December, Pumpkins For Pigs connects community members across the country with local farms, so their leftover pumpkins can be used for animal feed. / Pumpkins For Pigs.

The U.S. produces lots of pumpkins each year — more than 2 billion in 2020 alone. But that year, only one fifth were used for food, which means Americans are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the gourds annually, just to toss them in the trash when Halloween ends.

Pumpkins For Pigs is working to keep your pumpkins out of landfills and get them into the bellies of farm animals. This program aims to connect people with unwanted pumpkins — as long as they’re uncarved and unpainted — to farms that can use them.

In the U.S., over 1.3 billion pounds of pumpkin end up in landfills every single year, which means this program is a much-needed and worthwhile endeavor.

SOUTHWICK, MA (WGGB/WSHM) – For those with pumpkins still sitting on your front steps, Western Mass News has a way for you to recycle them while helping out local farmers.

With Halloween over, local farms are looking for leftover pumpkins to help feed to their animals. In Southwick, Lindsay Hale, the owner of Firefly Fields, told us how her animals love munching on them.

Gardeners can add pumpkins to the compost pile after removing any remaining seeds and being sure to cut off decorative material such as glitter, paint, stickers and candle wax. Slice the pumpkin into smaller pieces, scatter and bury them into the pile. And don’t worry if the pumpkin has already started getting moldy — those microorganisms aid the composting process.