Pumpkin smash events get Kane residents into composting

With the Halloween season now over, Joe Fidler of Aurora decided last Saturday morning that it was time for his family’s pumpkins to find a new home.

“It’s awesome. It’s going to be fun to just smash them, and it’s better than throwing them in the trash,” Fidler said as he and his two sons prepared to smash pumpkins at a pumpkin smashing event Saturday in Aurora. “We live right around the corner and it was nice and convenient for us. We’ll take these bats they gave us, warm up and let’s 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 destruction events in Illinois in 2014.

SCARCE founder and director Kay McKeen said there are four sites 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 allowing compost collection at special events,” she said. “We started with three cities in DuPage County and this year we have 24 cities in DuPage and 115 that we know of across the country.”

Pumpkin Smash events are designed to reduce the number of pumpkins that end up in landfills. Instead, the pumpkins are broken up and used as compost.

In Kane County, McKeen said pumpkin collections have been strong, including at the Geneva Pumpkin Kill site at Peck and Bricher roads.

“Geneva had a record last year in terms of pounds harvested,” she said. “Cities don’t always tell us how many pounds they gain. Some count the number of pumpkins, others the number of cars, some tell us the weight. Since 2014, we have composted over 1,418 tons. It’s a very good nutrient for the soil and you don’t need as much fertilizer or pesticides, if at all. We have learned over the years that soil enriched with food scraps also retains more water, which which reduces flooding.

This year, the Aurora site for pumpkin recycling was at an ALDI-owned facility at 1245 Corporate Blvd. This is the second year the site has participated in the pumpkin recycling effort.

“We’re really grateful that ALDI is doing this. It’s pretty cool because they’ve been selling pumpkins and now they’re helping get them back,” McKeen said.

Fidler was at the Aurora location where ALDI’s Emily Wiora was overseeing the pumpkin smashing that took place in a parking lot and in a grassy area near a dumpster where the remains were later collected.

“I’m the sustainability director and this is the second time we’ve had this here,” she said. “We encouraged all of our employees and people in the community to come and recycle their pumpkins. We understand the importance of keeping them out of landfills and we had the space to do it. We know we had a successful event and we wanted to do it again. Last year we received over 100 pumpkins.”

Ashley Donaldson and her daughter Bryce were in attendance and said, “With everything going on in the environment, everyone is just looking for a way to keep the Earth green.”

Bryce Donaldson, 10, was using an aluminum baseball bat to smash a pumpkin at the event and said she was “ready to hit (pumpkins) again when they come.”

“I think learning more about this and about recycling is a good thing,” she said.

The Geneva site for the pumpkin destruction effort was located in the city’s community gardens and was considerably busier than the Aurora site, as staff there said a total of 716 pumpkins were brought in during the first 90 minutes of the event Saturday.

Kaitlin Meno, of Geneva, and her family were among those who dropped off and smashed pumpkins in Geneva on Saturday and said it was “our first time at this, but based on today, we’ll definitely be back.”

“Until now, we have always composted our pumpkins at home,” she said. “We brought four pumpkins. It was worth the trip.”

And she said she learned something, too: “Pumpkins were easier to break than I thought.”

David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.