It's post-Halloween and I'm eating the leftover candy. After half the day has passed, I'm left with a pile of candy wrappers that will ultimately find its way to a landfill. Thinking back to my previous post about consumer waste as pop art, I began to think about the staggering amount of waste generated by Halloween and other holidays (I'm looking at you, Cadbury Easter eggs). Not much can be done with the little individual wrappers. After the fun of consuming the sweets, there comes a slight melancholy that only a pile of empty candy wrappers and the crash of the sugar rush could produce. The guilt of candy consumption and production of trash is a small offense but one that is committed frequently and ritualistically in American culture. Social rituals as holiday traditions can harm the environment in addition to drastically illustrate the wasteful habits of this culture.
Looking online, I was unable to find anything to ease my guilt. World.org didn't have much with regard to finding useful ways to deal with the inevitable waste generated by candy wrappers.
Candy Foil
Unwrap candy carefully and save the foil. Use the foil to wrap homemade candy.
Glue to a thin piece of cardboard (or thick piece of paper), hole punch, and sew to clothing as sequins.
Candy Wrappers
Use when making homemade candy. Make sure they are clean and dry.
String the wrappers together through the center to make a party lei. [1]
Their ideas seemed somewhat preposterous. "Party lei?" Come on! I'm not that handy either at making my own homemade candy. I recycle and the resulting pile of cans, bottles, and things can be quite unappealing. But things such as these are accumulated on a pretty regular basis as opposed to holiday candy or candy in general. It is not often that individual candy wrappers can be salvaged in resusable condition and in sufficient numbers to create a "party lei." Candy wrappers can't go in the recycling bin either.
The coolest re-use I have seen for candy wrappers is the handbag. The notion of it is novel and the brightly colored wrappers appear to catch the eye. However, I imagine that if the manufacturers were really serious about the business, they may opt for unused candy wrappers to prevent contamination of the product and reduce the cost of sorting through used candy wrappers. But, to me, it seems that the design and colors of the bag are its selling points. Without being told about the nature of the materials, I think the product can sell on its own based solely on its appearance. 
It seems that many holidays generate a great deal of waste, for example, Christmas with its wrapping paper or any sort of gift-giving holiday. But holiday wrapping paper and the gift boxes must all be recyclable, I imagine. It's just all the energy and resources that go into making them seem to outweigh their relative usefulness. I'm not the kind that saves and reuses wrapping paper. I think people purchase new rolls of wrapping paper each year because they can't find their old wrapping paper or they don't like their old wrapping paper anymore. Recycled wrapping paper seems like a waste to me, too. The usefulness of wrapping paper is low relative to the cost of its production. I think paper should be used for more productive purposes, at the very least copier paper. Copier paper can be used all year long and doesn't go out of style. 
[1] World Environmental Organization, "Recycling Database recycle: candy wrappers," http://www.world.org/reuse/candy.wrappers
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