The only thing scarier than Halloween? Getting rid of a sad looking jack-o’-lantern when it's over.

When confronted with a rotting, deflating carved pumpkin, your first instinct might be to beeline to the trash as quickly as possible. But experts caution against doing so—warning that trashing pumpkins, and thus sending them to landfill, can release harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

“Everybody throws them out from Halloween to right after Thanksgiving,” says Kay McKeen, executive director at Scarce, an environmental education non-profit. “It's a huge burst of methane gas that's going into the landfill all at one time.”

Why shouldn’t you trash your pumpkin?

When pumpkins are sent to landfill, they release methane, a potent greenhouse gas that, over a 20 year period, is around 80 times more powerful at trapping heat in the atmosphere when compared to carbon dioxide.

The lack of oxygen in landfills causes pumpkins to rot “anaerobically,” which releases methane.…