The Psychology of Waste: Why We Overconsume During Celebrations

“It’s just one night.”
“It’s for the kids.”
“Come on, it’s the holidays!”

Every festive season, from Halloween to Chinese New Year, we give ourselves permission to go a little extra. More food. More packaging. More… everything.

But here’s the truth: it’s never just one night.

Our short-term celebrations reveal long-term habits. How we justify overconsumption, rationalise waste, and let culture and convenience override conscience.

Credit: Photo by Toni Cuenca

Halloween: Trick or Trash

Halloween might be marketed as harmless fun, but behind the sugar rush is a massive waste footprint.

In the US, Halloween isn’t just about costumes, it’s one of the biggest candy events of the year. According to the National Confectioners Association’s State of Treating report, Halloween candy sales topped US$7.4 billion in 2024. In fact, the “Big Four” candy seasons: Valentine’s Day, Easter, Halloween, and the winter holidays together make up 62% of all confectionery sales annually.

But behind the sugar-fuelled celebrations is a major plastic problem. All those individually wrapped sweets add up to an estimated hundreds of thousands of tonnes of packaging waste each year. Mini candy packs feel harmless because they’re small, but that’s exactly the problem. A single 1kg bag of assorted Halloween candy can contain up to 80–100 individual wrappers. Multiply that by the number of households celebrating, and you have millions of non-recyclable pieces of plastic generated overnight.

From an industry standpoint, “fun-size” packaging is a marketing win: smaller portions, more variety, more sales. But from an environmental standpoint, it’s a nightmare. Most wrappers are made from multi-layered plastic films, thin combinations of plastic and aluminium designed to keep candy fresh, but impossible for recycling systems to separate and process. Once coated with food residue and dyes, they’re classified as contamination. On top of that, recycling facilities are designed to handle larger, uniform materials like bottles or containers. Anything smaller than a credit card slips through the machinery and becomes residue. Meaning nearly every candy wrapper ever produced ends up in a landfill, incinerator, or scattered in the environment.

Even brands experimenting with compostable or paper-based wrappers face scalability challenges. These materials can’t yet match the barrier protection of plastic, especially in humid climates like Malaysia’s. So while innovation is happening, it’s not fast enough to offset the mountains of waste we’re still producing each festive season.

In Southeast Asia, where plastic waste management systems are already under pressure, these small-format plastics are one of the biggest culprits of pollution. They’re too light to be collected profitably, too mixed to recycle, and too durable to disappear. They slip through sorting lines, wash into drains, and eventually make their way to rivers and oceans, a high cost for something that’s enjoyed in seconds.

According to a 2019 UK study by Hubbub, over 2,000 tonnes of plastic waste are generated every Halloween, just from costumes. That’s equivalent to 83 million plastic bottles. And that’s not even counting candy wrappers, decorations, and packaging.

Yet, we shrug and say, “It’s just once a year.”

This is what psychologists call moral licensing, when doing something we perceive as “good” (celebrating family, building community, spreading joy) gives us an unconscious pass to do something “bad” (waste, over-consume, ignore impact).

It’s the same logic behind “I went to the gym, so I deserve this dessert.”
Our brain keeps the reward, but conveniently forgets the consequence.

Credit: Photo by Eyez Heaven

Our Brain on Celebration Mode

Festive seasons activate a powerful mix of dopamine (pleasure) and oxytocin (connection). We’re wired to associate abundance with joy, big feasts, bright packaging, overflowing tables. It’s a primal cue of prosperity and safety.

Marketers know this. That’s why you see limited-edition packaging and “festive bundles” flooding shelves every season. They’re designed to trigger emotional buying, not logical buying.

This taps into a cognitive bias called temporal discounting, where we prioritize short-term gratification (“candy now!”) over long-term consequences (“microplastics later”).

In fact, behavioural economists have found that humans are more likely to make impulsive purchases when celebrating or under emotional influence- a key driver behind holiday waste spikes.

Credit: Photo by Erick Ortega

“It’s Tradition!” (Or Is It?)

We often defend our festive habits under the banner of tradition, but many “traditions” are actually just modern conveniences in disguise.

Disposable tableware. Plastic décor. Individually wrapped snacks.
None of these existed a few generations ago.

It seems like there’s this gap between intention and action. People want to be eco-conscious, yet tradition and convenience often win out.

That tension between cultural identity and sustainable behaviour is what makes festive waste such a tricky problem.

We’re not lazy. We’re just human. We seek comfort in the familiar. And for many, that familiarity has been wrapped (literally) in plastic.

Credit: Photo by Yaroslav Shuraev

Rewiring the Celebration Mindset

If we want lasting change, we need to shift the question from
“How can I be sustainable this holiday?” to
“What does celebration mean without waste?”

Start small, stay consistent:

• 🎁 Ditch disposables. Reuse, rent, or swap costumes and décor.
• 🍫 Choose better packaging. Opt for paper-wrapped or bulk-bought treats. Home-made treats are a great option too!
• 🧙♀️ Make it communal. Share resources, not waste, like costume swap parties or refill stations.
• 💭 Reflect post-event. How much ended up as trash? What can be reduced next time?

We’ve talked more about this mindset shift in our Pyramid of Sustainability article- it’s all about building better habits from the ground up.

Because every “just one night” adds up, billions of candy wrappers, plastic bags, and decorations at a time.

And the irony? Most of it’s forgotten by morning.

Credit: Photo by Jibaro Foto

The Takeaway

Our brains are brilliant at celebrating, but terrible at calculating impact.
We chase moments of happiness and forget that joy doesn’t need to come wrapped in plastic.

Sustainability doesn’t mean less fun.
It means fun that lasts longer.

So next time you hear yourself saying, “It’s just one night,”
ask instead: “What if every night looked like this?”

Because that’s how habits (and waste) start.