Harper Cooley swings a wooden mallet at a pumpkin in Traverse City during the “Pumpkin Smashing Extravaganza” on Nov. 9, 2024. (Photo: Izzy Ross/IPR News)
This reporting is made possible through a partnership between IPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
Nine-year-old Gunner Vistisen was wearing goggles, a wooden mallet in hand, standing near a blue tarp lined with pumpkins on a lot in Traverse City.
He’s here for one reason: “Smashing pumpkins.”
Not the alt-rock band — he’s actually going to be smashing pumpkins.
Gunner and his sister, Lena, are hitting pumpkins with mallets to break them into pieces to go into Traverse City’s new in-vessel composting unit.
Michigan grows a lot of pumpkins each year. It’s actually among the top pumpkin-producing states in the country, growing 80 million pounds in 2023 according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
And after Halloween, the pumpkins can end up in landfills. This year, Traverse City wanted to change that by getting more of them composted.
The city, Carter’s Compost, and the nonprofit SEEDS held the “Pumpkin Smashing Extravaganza” after more than a week of collecting pumpkins at the new composter.
The underlying goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions coming from landfills, like methane that comes from food waste.
“We had an initial goal of one ton to divert from landfills, and we exceeded that in the first three days of our collections,” said Megan Alexander, the owner of Carter’s Compost.
Alexander was shoveling pieces of pumpkin into blue bins which are tipped into the in-vessel composter. The machine looks like a storage container with a big auger that mixes up the organic materials inside, speeding decomposition. She said after they surpassed one ton of pumpkin waste, they raised their goal to 2 tons.
“This in-vessel composter is the key to that, to being able to process two tons of pumpkins in a week,” she said.
When IPR checked back in a few days after the event, Carter said they ended up getting more than three tons of pumpkin waste.
Efforts to keep pumpkins out of the landfills have been taking place around the country, from Boston to Chicago to Los Angeles.
Back in Traverse City, most of the kids are focused on destroying orange gourds.
But the adults, like Kristen VanDerKolk, say the kids get the bigger picture, too. Her youngest, 6-year-old Charlie, was sad about the jack-o-lantern’s fate — he gave it a kiss before placing it on the stump to be smashed.
“He definitely has a heart for the environment,” Vanderkalk said. “He’ll find litter and pick it up and so he was very excited to know that something was gonna happen with the pumpkins that was gonna be helpful.”
Of course, sometimes it just feels good to smash things.
The Traverse City pumpkin drop off is closed now, but there are still many ways to compost in the region, from municipal services to your own backyard pile.