Families brought more than 900 pumpkins to La Grange Park’s Pumpkin Smash Saturday, filling a dumpster.
“Some families just walked up, pulling their pumpkins in a wagon behind them,” said Rick Radde, La Grange Park’s director of public works. “One guy came on a riding mower pulling a trailer that had 15 to 20 pumpkins on it.”
The decomposing pumpkins will be tilled into the soil as compost, Radde said.
La Grange Park’s event was organized by the village’s Sustainability Commission.
Scarce, an organization that promotes recycling and other environmental issues in DuPage County, sponsors annual pumpkin collections the Saturday after Thanksgiving. They were held Nov. 7 in the parking lot of the Western Springs pool and at Hinsdale South High School in Darien.
“We counted 435 pumpkins . . . from 9 a.m. to noon,” said Hinsdale South teacher Adam Hallihan and co-sponsor of the high school’s Environmental Concerns Organization, which hosted the event. “Those 435 pumpkins weighed over 4,600 pounds.”
At the school, people could use mallets and sledgehammers to smash their pumpkins to smithereens on plastic tarps before they were hauled away.
“I smashed a few Jack o’ lanterns,” said South Principal Arwen Pokorny Lyp. “I brought my kids, too, and they had a blast smashing.”
“Some children chose to throw the pumpkins on the ground or smash them with their feet,” Hallihan said. “Using your feet was also a popular smashing method for the ECO members as well.”
The school’s waste hauler, Republic, takes the smashed pumpkins to a composting facility, where they will be combined with other organic waste from the area and turned into compost, Hallihan said.
According to Scarce, “Pumpkins are 90% water. This is great for soil, but not for landfills since that liquid is landfill leachate that must be treated,” Hallihan said.
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When left to decompose in landfills, pumpkins also release methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
