The spookiest day of the year is just around the corner—and the alt-press has been gearing up for weeks. So hold out your virtual goodie bags and let us load them up with links to everything from the best pumpkin ales and vegan Halloween candy, to expertly carved pumpkins and how to mind your spooky manners. Here’s wishing you a very alternative holiday.

—Trick-or-treating? Forgo the plastic pumpkin pail. Craft has DIY instructions for recycling a t-shirt into a trick-or-treat bag.

—VegNews has the Official Guide to Vegan Halloween Candy. Too much candy? Discover reports on two charity-minded Michigan dentists’ cash-for-candy scheme.

—Psychology Today offers advice on Halloween etiquette, including how to signal to others whether or not you’re handing out treats.

—Did you know you can recycle candy wrappers? Our sister publication Natural Home lists some less-obvious ways to green your Halloween.

—For the adults, Imbibe recommends a seasonal selection of spicy pumpkin ales, one of which gets a second thumbs-up from Paste’s editor in chief.

—Mental Floss rounds up classic Halloween TV specials, as well as some creative ways to carve pumpkins. Creative Review also has a nice (albeit small) gallery of illustrators’ art pumpkins.

—Banish boring pumpkin seeds: Natural Solutions recommends roasting pepitas with a pinch of chili-lime seasoning; Mothering shares a promising recipe for pumpkin seed pesto ravioli.

Sources: Craft, VegNews, Psychology Today, Natural Home, Discover, Imbibe, Mental Floss, Creative Review, Natural Solutions, Mothering

Image by foundphotoslj, licensed under Creative Commons.

In the category of brilliant ideas: If you make less than $25,000/year, you can request a free galley copy of Stephen Elliott’s true-crime memoir The Adderall Diaries, released today from Graywolf Press. (Galleys are those advance reader copies, soft-cover editions that sometimes find homes in reading programs and the like, but too often end up in recycling bins.)

Read about the free book offer at The Rumpus, which Elliott edits, plus details of his book tour.

Source: Graywolf Press, The Rumpus

Issue #5 of Philly-based sustainability magazine Grid arrived this week—chock full of summertime “how to” cheer that’s just begging to be shared. Grid is a free magazine, and you can read its entire digitized issue online. Be sure to check out:

How to make rhubarb cobbler on page 15: This tasty-looking recipe calls for delectable maple sugar instead of the loads of predictable, refined white sugar found in most rhubarb concoctions.

How to attract beneficial insects to your garden on page 12: From lacewings to ladybugs, Grid has the skinny on how to lure the good guys—insects that pollinate and keep pest populations in check—into your yard, including specific “companion plants.”

Plus: How to fix a flat bike tire (page 10), how to recycle your television (page 11), and loads of other recipes, including vegan blood orange cupcakes and sugar-snap peas with bacon.

Source: Grid

Organic Gardening just made this bicycle geek smile: The May 2009 issue includes simple instructions on how to convert old bike wheel rims into a support for climbing garden plants, like beans. All the nailing and stringing necessary (which isn’t much), happens through the holes already there for spokes. Brilliant!

Source: Organic Gardening

Forget everything you’ve heard about mountains of bottled water waste! Disregard the experts who prove that tap water is almost identical in quality! Viva bottled water!

That’s the battle cry EnjoyBottledWater.org raises in its quest to free bottled water from persecution. The website is run by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market advocacy organization that believes that “individuals are best helped not by government intervention, but by making their own choices in a free marketplace.” (Feel free to insert your own cynical economic observation here.)

The site exhaustively details why bottled water is a misunderstood and wrongly persecuted beverage medium, and why it’s our right as Americans to drink it. Users are encouraged to sign a petition against “foolish lawmakers and regulators” taking away the right to the stuff, donate money to the cause, and purchase Enjoybottledwater.org merchandise (no reusable water bottles, naturally). Visitors can also read up on the “crazy bans” enacted by cities and those “silly claims” that bottles affect global warming.

A few of the highlighted benefits are somewhat sensible, like ease of distribution at disaster sites, but the flippant disregard for known facts goes beyond chutzpah to being ridiculous. The best headline of the bunch: “Is Beer Next?”

Image courtesy of judepics, licensed under Creative Commons .

New York artist Jean Shin makes detailed, beautiful works of art using recyclables like empty bottles and refuse like old vinyl records. Perhaps the most impressive pieces are “Chance City,” meticulous scale-model buildings made entirely of discarded lottery tickets, and the melted-vinyl tidal wave "Sound Wave," now at the Museum of Art and Design.

Ryan Curtis from Environmental Graffiti identifies this as the essence of her art: taking worthless things like those tickets and giving them renewed value as works of art. Using discarded objects to make art is not new, but Curtis argues that Shin “manages to bring the items together in a way that makes us think about them in a new light. Previously, those vinyl records, lottery tickets, clothes and shoes meant something to us, and were very important in our lives. [She shows] us that not only are these things still of value; they are also still beautiful.”

We’re approaching moving season, which in many cities is marked by overflowing trash cans, rain-soaked mattresses stacked on curbs, and gas-guzzling U-Haul trailers being dragged to and fro. The whole process is hard on the environment—not to mention the pocketbook and the nerves—but it doesn’t have to be. If you’re planning a move, or just gearing up for some belated spring cleaning, here’s a quick guide to keeping your old stuff out of the landfill and finding some new duds on the cheap while you’re at it. 

Books, movies, and other media: Eco-blogger Green LA Girl recommends Swaptree, an easy-to-use site that lets you trade your unwanted books, music, movies, and video games for media you’re actually interested in. For example, you send away The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and someone sends you a Little Miss Sunshine DVD. Swaptree even prepares a mailing label for you to print, which means no inconvenient trips to the post office. (Zunafish and BarterBee are similar sites.)

Just books: Try book-swapping sites BookMooch and PaperBackSwap (also courtesy of Green LA Girl).

Clothing: If there’s a Swap-O-Rama-Rama in your neck of the woods, grab a big bag of clothes, a little bit of cash, and head on over. You can swap-and-go, if that’s your preference, or stick around and use a sewing station to turn someone else’s old T-shirt into something you’ll love. (There are artists on-site to help with sewing, embroidering, knitting, etc.) For something a bit less DIY, try Swapstyle.com, which is more of a straight-up online fashion exchange. If you’re just looking to donate to a good cause, Dress for Success will pass along your business attire to low-income women building their careers, and the Glass Slipper Project will give your prom dress to a Chicago high school student who can’t afford her own. “Ready to Rewear,” from our March-April 2007 issue, has additional tips. And the new book Wake Up and Smell the Planet points out that even your holiest socks can be put to good use: Goodwill sends away its rattier stock to be recycled or reused.

Kids’ stuff: At Zwaggle, families earn points by giving clothes, strollers, car seats, and all the other kid stuff you can think of to other members of the site. You earn “zoints” for each item donated, which you can then cash in for new-to-you goods from other families.  

Furniture, etc.: If you’re drowning in stuff and just looking to unload, try Throwplace, a site that matches your extra futon or underused toaster oven with charities and nonprofits that need them. For both buying and selling, the old standbys Craigslist and Freecycle rarely disappoint.

Computers: For newish computer equipment, Sierra’s Answer Guy, Bob Schildgen, recommends Share the Technology, which lists schools and nonprofits seeking technology. Grist suggests the National Cristina Foundation, which will find a deserving home for your computer, printer, or software.

Electronics: CollectiveGood may be able to fix up your old-school Nokia and put it to good use; if not, they’ll recycle it, Grist says. GreenDisk will also recycle your old electronics (even cables and cases), and you can now recycle e-waste at select post offices, reports Sustainable Industries—just be sure to check that your post office is one of the 1,500 participating in the program.

Any other suggestions? Chat in the Utne salons.

Images by Matt Seppings and amy_b, licensed under Creative Commons.

Our sister publication Mother Earth News has an online rundown of a fun little springtime DIY project: making kites from recycled materials.

You can choose from designs that use paper bags or newspaper. Or you can go with non-recycled (but still inexpensive) fare such as paper, foam balls, and feathers. For the expert kite-flyer and -maker, there’s some guidance on DIY sport and stunt kites, too.

Image by ronnie44052, licensed under Creative Commons.

After moving to New York from Paris, Miwa Koizumi was astounded by the piles of garbage that lined the city’s streets. And, in the eco-aware tradition of artists like Chris Jordan, she wanted to do something artistic about it. Faced with a low budget for art supplies, an abundance of free trash, and a fascination for sea creatures, Koizumi started converting plastic and glass bottles into beautiful, complex, and surprisingly lifelike jellyfish sculptures, which are featured in the Fall 2007 issue of Theme magazine.

Koizumi uses a number of tools to painstakingly craft her sea creatures—unfortunately, the sculptures don’t reproduce as quickly as their underwater brethren—but on the upside, her costs probably stay relatively low. “I have as much material as I want,” she writes on her website, “just by fishing in the garbage.”

—Sarah Pumroy 

Photo by Dylan Griffin, courtesy of  Theme magazine .