As the No. 1 producer of pumpkins in the country, Illinois sends thousands of them to landfills every year. To divert pumpkins from landfills, the Village of Northbrook hosts the Northbrook Pumpkin Smash, an event at which participants can throw pumpkins into a large dumpster to be composted.
“We don’t have a single active landfill in Cook County,” said Kate Carney, sustainability coordinator for the Village of Northbrook. “So literally all of [Northbrook’s] waste gets exported to somewhere else, and so the less we have to send … the more affordable it stays for us to be able to dispose of our waste.”
The Pumpkin Smash is an annual effort started by SCARCE, a nonprofit for environmental education, where towns host events for residents to compost pumpkins.
This year’s Northbrook Pumpkin Smash is scheduled to take place on Nov. 8 from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. at Northbrook Court’s northeast parking lot near Neiman Marcus. Participants bring their own pumpkins, and the event is free to attend.
To avoid waste, participants should remove glued items, stickers and candles from their pumpkins prior to attending the event.
“If we put the pumpkins back into the land through composting, and then put that compost in the Illinois farms, we’re putting all those nutrients, all that water, back into the soil,” said Bev Jaszczurowski, chief operating officerof SCARCE. “The point of the Pumpkin Smash [is] to teach people how cool and easy it could be to compost something.”
Northbrook has hosted an annual pumpkin smash since 2021.
“Last year we collected 1.37 tons of pumpkins here in Northbrook,” Carney said.
Lakeshore Recycling Services transports collected pumpkins to Midwest Organics, an industrial composting facility.
“Midwest Organics has these big, huge rows that get to really high temperatures to break down all of that organic material,” said Carney. “They’ve got a really great process where it gets turned and moved around frequently, and then they sell that finished compost to a manufacturer that then sells it in the store.”
According to Jaszczurowski, pumpkin composting is one way to offset your carbon footprint.
“If you understand that an average pumpkin is 10 pounds and 92 percent of that is water, you can do the math and figure out how much water you save [and] how much water you rescue,” Jaszczurowski said.
Participants can also guess the number of pumpkin seeds in a jar for prizes, add to a sidewalk chalk mural and learn more about organic waste recycling through informational flyers.
Junior Cecily Stash, a student member on the Northbrook Sustainability Commission, is drawing the mural to get more people interested in the event, she said.
“[Carney and I] thought it would be a good opportunity to use my [art] skills and help the community with their Pumpkin Smash,” Stash said.
According to Jaszczurowski, over 164.7 tons of pumpkin were composted by 50 participating Pumpkin Smash locations around the country just last year.
“We’re talking about rescuing water,”said Jaszczurowski. “We are saving it from being gone forever.”