It’s the Most Popular Halloween Decoration of Our Time. But It’s Posing a Very Big Problem for Owners.

Downtime What Happens When the Big-Boy Skeletons Are Laid to Rest … Again? Everyone’s favorite 12-foot-tall bone buddies pose a storage problem for city dwellers. NYC’s garbage czar has the dirt on their fate after Halloween. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Nadira Goffe? Oct 31, 20265:50 AM Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Home Depot and Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The infamous 12-foot-tall skeleton from Home Depot has been a trendy Halloween decoration from the moment it rattled onto the scene in 2020. Since the gargantuan lawn ornament became a seasonal staple—still striking and fearsome compared to an ever-expanding universe of inflatables—the owners of these big-boned baddies have delighted neighborhoods all across America with their elaborate skeletal scenes. Some have created undead couples, some have staged bony reenactments of spooky movies, and some companies have even used the skeleton in their own marketing campaigns. Large decorations such as these clearly make sense for rural and suburban Halloween fans, where they’ve got lawns and garages and sheds galore, but what about city dwellers who have limited storage space? This is the question my colleague at Slate had when he spotted one of the marrow monsters shoved onto a sliver of concrete next to a stoop where he lives in Harlem. He appreciated his neighbors’ spooky spirit, but he couldn’t help but wonder: If they can’t find a place to keep their giant pelvic bones in the offseason, do we just have femurs snapping in the back of garbage trucks, or tibias poking out of landfills? What happens to these dead dudes when they’ve reached the end of their life … again? Well, short of putting my boots on the ground and inspecting all of New York City’s dumpsters, I decided to ring up someone who is essentially paid to do just that. To get into the ins and outs of giant osseous waste, I spoke to Gregory Anderson, New York’s sanitation commissioner, to learn what he and his employees would do when such massive remains turn into refuse. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. Nadira Goffe: Are you aware of these giant skeletons? Would you say that you have seen more gigantic Halloween decor in sanitation recently? Gregory Anderson: I personally am aware of the trend, and I have a friend who has one of these 12-foot skeletons in her front yard. I do think that, because they sell out every year, people really prize them and they hold on to them and are hopefully using them year after year. Hopefully! Though we know it won’t always be possible. In terms of an ethos around holiday decoration, what would you say to New Yorkers and other city dwellers in terms of how they should be thinking about decorating and disposability? A lot of what we use as holiday decorations can be reused. For New Yorkers, sometimes space is tight and so you may not be able to store a 12-foot skeleton in your apartment, but if you have a space to put it up, we hope that you store it for the winter. We also see, as part of this trend, that some people are taking the same 12-foot skeleton and using it for multiple different holidays. So some folks have bought a Santa costume and put it on the skeleton. They’re dressing it up for St. Patrick’s Day. So they’re able to get multiple seasons of use out of one thing, and that also embodies this spirit of reuse. I’ve definitely seen some funny out-of-season uses of the giant skeletons online. But if someone was trying to dispose of it—let’s say they’re moving to a smaller apartment—is that possible? At the end of the day, if you are a New Yorker and you have a 12-foot skeleton you’re trying to get rid of, you can recycle it. According to Home Depot, these are made out of high-density polyethylene plastic, which is one of the many types of rigid plastic that we accept in our recycling program. So you can put it out with the rest of your recyclables for collection and we’ll take it and recycle it. Oh wow. So would it be able to go out just with your normal recycling at any time, or is there a specific day for larger pickups of something this … unique? Anytime it’s your recycling day is fine. Recycling collection is one day a week. So on your recycling day, you can put it out. And we might encourage New Yorkers to disassemble it so it’s in smaller pieces, but even if it’s 12 feet tall, we can still take it in our trucks. … Really? Yep. That’s impressive. We take items of all sizes. Sometimes it takes a couple cycles of the truck compressing to be able to really get the thing in there, but our trucks, they’re really powerful, and they can compress pretty much anything. Outside of skeletons, what are some of the oddest things that you might have heard of, or personally seen, being disposed of during spooky season? I think the thing that probably gets disposed of the most is jack-o’-lanterns. Starting this Sunday, we’ll see a lot of pumpkins and jack-o’-lanterns and other fall décor ending up in the trash. And what we really want New Yorkers to do with that is put it in your compost bin. We have a mandatory universal compost program in New York City, so if you have pumpkins that are looking a little sad after Halloween, put it out in your compost bin on your recycling day and we’ll turn it into either renewable energy or nutrient-rich compost. OK, since I’ve got you, here’s a personal quandary: I own a roll of caution tape because I tried to use the tape to make a dress for a themed party. It didn’t work, but I did use it as an accessory, and by the end of the night, I had a bunch of caution-tape fragments left to dispose of. Caution tape (and decorations of a similar format) are popular for Halloween. How should we go about disposing of that? I just have a whole bunch of cut caution tape in my living room right now. Unfortunately, the caution tape is not a rigid plastic, so it would have to go in the trash. And also, if it were still in a whole roll, because our recycling plant relies on conveyor belts and screens and a lot of moving pieces, things that are long and flexible like that can actually wrap around all of the mechanical equipment and cause jams and other issues. So we really want to avoid things like garden hoses; sometimes we get old-school reel-to-reel video films that can wrap around different things. We want to make sure we keep those tanglers out of the recycling bin—but anything else that’s rigid plastic, metal, glass, you can put in there. Wow, I think it’s cool that you still get old-school film. Though I’m sad that people are getting rid of it! Do you have any final message for New Yorkers who are decorating for Halloween? I think that decorating for the holidays offers a real opportunity to be creative and to use what’s around you, what you already have, in different ways. And not only does that save you money because you’re not buying new things, but it can help reduce the waste that you’re creating and the greenhouse gas footprint that you’re ultimately contributing to. Climate Change Halloween Holidays Infrastructure New York City