Fireworks are not very good for the environment. If you consider
what fireworks actually do, which is to pointlessly fill the air with tons of
smoke, colored fire and shrieking noises, it's hard to come up with any other
conclusion. When I first heard the buzz about this growing outrage over the
July 4th pyrotechnic indulgences, my sentiments could largely be
summed up by the following: who cares?
Despite the fact that I would consider
myself fairly eco-minded (for instance, I believe that global warming is real
and potentially totally scary, that toxic waste pollution is on balance a
fairly serious problem, and that biodiversity is worth safeguarding), my
initial reaction was almost entirely of aggressive apathy. Why? The short
answer is that fireworks are totally awesome. If the word ‘awesome' looked like
something, it might look like a firework exploding.
Moreover, the Fourth of July for many of us is an almost
sacred tradition, of which fireworks constitute a seemingly indispensable part.
The moment when the fiery petals of a roman candle open over the Washington
monument on the Fourth of July, with thousands of people oohing
and ahhing together in stupefied amazement is one of
those crucial moments of starry-eyed affinity with this nation and the people
who work for it that, whether or not you work in government, we all come to
treasure. The idea of trading that moment away for some more eco-friendly simulacrum,
whatever it may be, already seemed preposterous to me.
However slowly, I began to re-examine the equation. What
exactly are fireworks? The short
answer is that they are a lot of gunpowder, a lot of a petroleum-based toxin
used in rocket fuel called perchlorate and a lot of
heavy metals which correspond to different colors of flashes, such as strontium (red), aluminum (white), copper
(blue), barium (green), rubidium (purple), and cadmium (various). Lots of
people set off Fourth of July fireworks every year, mostly over bodies of water
to avoid risking fire, in large quantities, in communities all across the
country. That's a lot of all of these heavy metals being dumped into our water
supply all at once, not to mention rocket fuel.
Scientific surveys of lakes in
Pennsylvania found that the Fourth of July fireworks celebration substantially
contributed to levels of perchlorate, a chemical for
which ingestion in drinking water can be associated with all sorts of nasty birth
defects as well as thyroid cancer, according to a report
by the National Research Council of the National Academies. And that doesn't
even go into the various health problems with slurping up tons of firework-delivered
heavy metals in our drinking water, some of which are even
radioactive.
There are also rumors
circulating
that because many of our fireworks are manufactured in China,
and Chinese often use export production as an opportunity to illegally
‘dispose' of deposits of toxic waste (as has already been scandalously
revealed
in numerous other products over the past several years), that the
American
Fourth of July can be a major boon for firework exporters to pack in as
much
toxic detritus as possible, giving their clients a bigger and more
brightly
colorized bang for their buck. Ironically, we may be paying the
merchants of one
of our greatest geopolitical rivals for the privilege of poisoning
ourselves -- hardly patriotically appropriate for the Fourth.
However, there is a glimmer of
hope smoldering cleanly on the horizon. Scientists at Los Alamos National
Laboratory have been developing non-toxic substitutes for fireworks that both
produce less smoke and contain little if any color-producing heavy metals.
These emerging pyrotechnologies are replacing the
dangerous perchlorate with a more harmless nitrogen-based
fuel substitute, and because they are almost exclusively manufactured by
American companies, they are not at risk for tox-packing.
Currently
these ‘green fireworks' are being adopted mostly by companies whose
employees perform repeated pyrotechnic shows, such as theme parks and
event
companies, but they may gain traction among a more eco-conscious public
for next years America Day festivities. And yes, as with most
'good-for-you' stuff, the downside is that they do cost more, and don't
look as awesome.
In some ways, there's a part of me that ambivalently still refrains
that ‘we'll
all be dead someday, why not have our firework fun to the max while
we're
here?' But then another part of me rejoins that ‘if we really
let that type of thinking guide our choices, a lot more people would be dead a whole
lot sooner'. At the end of the day, there really isn't any good reason
to enrich foreign companies by drinking up a whole cocktail of toxic chemicals
every time you go to the water fountain unless you find yourself at a London rave or absolutely have to. And we don't!
Other Guest Columns:
Op-ed: With liberty, justice and innovation for all
by Teri Schindler
Op-ed: The Good Business of Good Citizenship
by Patrick Davis
Revitalizing Public Service: Primed for Change, Fueled by Passion
by Ruby DeMesme
Where does government fit into Obama’s call to service?
by Chris Asch
Raising the visibility of public service
by Chris Asch
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