20 DIY Halloween Decorations Using Recycled Materials

Every October, tons of single-use plastic Halloween decorations end up in landfills. Crafting your own spooky accents from household recyclables not only saves money, it also creates unique, vintage-looking haunted effects that mass-produced plastic can't match.

Before taking out the recycling this week, save your cardboard boxes, milk jugs, tin cans, and egg cartons for these 20 clever DIY upcycled decorations.

1. Glowing Milk Jug Ghost Lanterns: Draw sharpie ghost faces on clean 1-gallon milk jugs and drop battery tea lights inside to line your walkway.

2. 2-Liter Bottle Hanging Bats: Cut the rounded top off soda bottles, paint black, add cardstock wings, and hang upside down with fishing line from tree limbs.

3. Plastic Bottle Potion Vials: Clean small vitamin or sauce bottles, wrap necks in twine, and fill with green food-colored water labeled 'Frog Tears'.

4. Clorox Jug Skulls: Heavy white bleach jugs naturally look like bone — carve hollow eye sockets and nose bridges for indestructible porch skulls.

5. Shipping Box Graveyard Tombstones: Cut cereal and shipping boxes into tombstone arches, coat with textured gray primer, and paint epitaphs like 'R.I.P.' and 'Not Dead Yet'.

6. Paper Towel Tube Floating Candles: Paint paper towel rolls white, add hot-glue drips around the rim, insert battery tea lights, and hang with monofilament for a Hogwarts floating candle ceiling.

7. Egg Carton Bats: Cut a 3-cup section of a cardboard egg carton, notch the two outer cups into wing shapes, paint black, and add googly eyes.

8. Cardboard Haunted House Silhouettes: Cut Gothic windows and crooked rooftops from corrugated cardboard and place behind curtains with yellow backlighting.

9. Punched Tin Can Lanterns: Fill clean soup cans with water and freeze (to prevent dents), then hammer nail holes into ghost and cat outlines before inserting candles.

10. Monster Pickle Jars: Paint clean glass jars with translucent green or orange mod-podge, wrap with cheesecloth, and light from within.

11. Bottle Cap Spider Brooches: Paint metal beer bottle caps black, glue eight bent wire legs to the underside, and scatter across dining tables.

12. Aluminum Foil Embossed Spellbooks: Glue cardboard shapes onto an old catalog, wrap tightly in aluminum foil, and buff with black acrylic paint for an ancient pewter look.

13. Old T-Shirt Cobwebs: Take old white cotton undershirts and cut horizontal slits, then stretch and pull until the fibers fray into convincing cobwebs.

14. Scrap Fabric Yard Ghosts: Drape worn white pillowcases or bedsheets over inflated balloons on garden stakes and tie necks with garden twine.

15. Coffee Filter Hanging Specters: Dye round white coffee filters in watered-down black tea, scrunch over a cotton ball head, and hang in windows.

16. Twig & Vine Witch Brooms: Gather a sturdy fallen branch and bundle small dried twigs around the base with hemp rope.

17. Brown Paper Bag Luminarias: Stencil spooky silhouettes onto brown grocery bags, weigh down with pebbles, and insert battery LED candles along pathways.

18. Yarn & Wire Web Canvases: Stretch white scrap yarn across embroidery hoops or bicycle wheels into geometric spiderwebs.

19. Wire Coat Hanger Ghouls: Bend wire coat hangers into shoulders, cover with shredded dry-cleaning bags, and drape for billowing outdoor spirits.

20. Newspaper Papier-Mâché Pumpkins: Inflate a balloon, tie sections with string to form pumpkin lobes, and layer strips of old newsprint in flour paste.