The ‘throwaway plastic tat’ many Irish households are buying to celebrate Halloween is destroying the environment.

On Newstalk Breakfast this morning, environmental expert John Gibbons said parents should stop celebrating Halloween with ‘wanton displays of throwaway plastic’.

Mr Gibbons warned that the average Irish person is already producing nearly 65% more plastic waste than the average EU citizen.

He urged parents to make the best of the holiday with their children – but take a step back and think about the impact their decorations are having on Irish wildlife.

“What we are looking at here - and I described it as 'plastic tat' - is a lot of this throwaway stuff,” he said.

“A lot of it originates basically in China; it is petrochemicals and it is shipped 10,000 miles across the world to end up basically being single-use plastic in Ireland – and we are doing it in vast quantities.”

He said the fake cobweb that is becoming ever more popular outside Irish homes is especially damaging.

“You see it where people festoon their bushes and around their houses,” he said. “Around here, where I live in Dublin, I am seeing more of it than I’ve ever seen before.

“That stuff tangles up wildlife; birds get caught in it and when, eventually, it washes out or blows away, it ends up in the river or in the sea."

White Halloween spider webs decorating the fence of a house. Image: JSMimages / Alamy

Mr Gibbons said the plastic crisis has exploded in recent years with the amount of plastic waste generated each year increasing 200-fold since the 1950s.

He noted that Irish people have more to answer for than most when it comes to plastic waste.

“The average Irish person is producing an average of 54kg of plastic waste every year,” he said. “Now that’s the highest in the European Union.

“The average EU citizen produces 33kg of plastic waste so we are almost double.

“The point really here is not that we shouldn’t celebrate things but for some reason, when we Irish celebrate things, we just go, maybe, a little bit over the top.”

Plastic

Mr Gibbons noted that the plastic crisis has contaminated so much of the Earth and its atmosphere that there are now plastic nanoparticles in the average person’s bloodstream.

He urged parents to make the most of Halloween but to think twice about what they need to celebrate it.

“The advice really is to take a step back,” said. “It is going back to the way it was, even 20 or 30 years ago and that is, just do it in moderation.

“Halloween is about sending the kids out door to door and dressing up, putting on a bit of face paint – that kind of stuff,” he said.

“You can do all of that and when you’re finished with your Halloween stuff, put it away and use it again next year. Have fun but just keep an eye out.

“Remember your kids are watching you and they are learning from your behaviour.”

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