National Costume Swap Day brings ‘green’ to Halloween

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He started out as Spider-Man before morphing into a swamp monster, then a mummy. I’m talking about my kid and the many costumes he’s cycled through in that annual trick-or-treat extravaganza known as Halloween.

Saturday, on National Costume Swap Day, parents who are looking to skip the corollary ritual of spending $40-plus at a pop-up costume shop might want to visit the Green Halloween website and find a costume trade in their area.

The Los Angeles Costume Swap, taking place Sunday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Mar Vista Farmer’s Market, is among the area’s largest swaps, so if you’ve got a pirate costume but need Batman, you’re more likely to find one. According to Green Halloween, if just half of all American kids swapped costumes instead of buying them new, 6,200 tons of waste would be diverted from U.S. landfills.

‘It goes to show how wasteful we are when we buy everything new when we have perfectly great things to swap amongst each other,’ said Andrea Woroch, a self-described consumer savings expert based in Santa Barbara who also recommends the websites swap.com and thredup.com for used costume trades.

-- Susan Carpenter