The first-ever pumpkin-smashing event on the North Fork is coming to Riverhead this weekend!

On Saturday, Nov. 7, bring your Halloween pumpkins and jack-o’-lanterns to the town’s yard waste facility at 532 Youngs Ave. in Riverhead between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Then pick up a mallet provided by the town, put on your gloves and safety vest and smash away!

Or toss your pumpkin through one of two Halloween-themed cornhole boards and crush it that way. A third option, which kids will probably love to watch, involves loading pumpkins into a front-end loader and watching them get smashed into pieces as they’re dumped onto the ground.

Town officials are hoping the event will attract plenty of families and help turn discarded pumpkins into compost instead of sending them to landfills.

The idea is the brainchild of the town’s Civil Engineer, Joe Rutt, who participated in a New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) webinar on reducing waste in September. He said he brought the pumpkin-smashing idea to the Town Board and it was approved unanimously.

“When I proposed the Pumpkin Smash idea, I requested $1,500 from the town,” Rutt said. “I’ve actually spent under $750 to put everything together.

“The event came together pretty quickly,” he continued. “The DEC showed us how kids can smash pumpkins and the biggest thing was safety. We’re providing everyone with safety glasses in all sizes, leather work gloves and a safety vest. We don’t even want them to get a little pumpkin in their eye!”

So pumpkins that once beckoned at farm stands, were hand-picked from pumpkin patches or loaded into supermarket carts will hopefully find new life as compost at the town’s facility.

Testing out the equipment ahead of Saturday’s event, Supervisor Jerry Halpin and other Town Board members gathered outside the Buildings and Grounds building on Pulaski Street last Friday afternoon.

Councilwoman Denise Merrifield, wearing an orange safety vest and yellow work gloves, gripped one of the mallets with both hands and swung hard, bringing it down on an unsuspecting pumpkin perched atop a wooden stump. In an instant — splat! The pumpkin burst into pieces, its seeds spewing onto the grass.

“It’s a good opportunity for kids not to smash their pumpkins the day after Halloween, but bring them to us. It’s all about helping the town recycle,” Merrifield said.

Halpin emphasized that the event offers residents an environmentally friendly way to dispose of their pumpkins by turning them into compost instead of throwing them away.

“I’m so excited about this because we’re keeping pumpkins out of the landfill — since we have a solid waste problem on Long Island — and do something fun with them. Parents and kids could have a good time and we can reduce our waste. It’s good for the planet and we pay for the tonnage we truck out.”

The town’s yard waste facility serves as a recycling and organics processing center, where materials are collected for reuse, proper disposal, including electronic waste recycling, and composting rather than being sent to landfills.

The event, believed to be the first of its kind on the North Fork, is free, open to all ages and will be held rain or shine. Rutt has been visiting farm stands and handing out flyers, hoping to encourage residents to join the smashing festivities.

Over the past few weeks, Buildings and Grounds Department staff have been building and painting the 4-by-4-foot cornhole stations, decorating them with spooky black-and-orange faces and bodies. They also fashioned mallets from tree branches attached to wooden dowels, making different sizes for children and adults.

Councilman Ken Rothwell said that “this is a great activity for families to have fun together while also protecting our environment by keeping food waste out of our landfills.”

Nationally, more than a billion pounds of pumpkins are discarded each year after Halloween. Applied to a community the size of Riverhead, Rutt said, that could represent roughly 100,000 to 140,000 pounds, or 50 to 70 tons, of pumpkins annually.

“We’ll also be dumping pumpkins into a front loader which will then raise up and drop them to the ground, smashing them, something kids will love,” Rutt said.

Officials cautioned that pumpkins treated with bleach to preserve them, heavily painted pumpkins and those containing candles will not be accepted for smashing.

“We’ll have people sign in because they’re going to be handling mallets. We’ll show them this is how you smash it,” Rutt said.

Rutt could be called a recycling guru. In less than two years, he has helped launch several recycling initiatives, including a backyard composting program, a rain barrel sale, the Half Shell for Habitat oyster and clam shell recycling program and a textile recycling program. He’s also developing a book recycling program to further reduce waste.

While the event came together in less than a month, cleanup should be much quicker. All the pumpkin smashing will take place right next to the compost pile at the town’s yard waste facility.

Rutt joked that he hopes “we don’t have a pumpkin patch growing in the landfill next year, because of all the seeds!”