Is the party over for balloons? Impact on environment raises possibility of a ban

As part of a service for an infant last year, the Sproles Family Funeral Home in New Castle, Indiana, attached a card with information about the deceased child to balloons and unleashed them – asking those who found the remembrances to post comments on the company's website.

Some of the responses came from strangers hundreds of miles away, offering comforting thoughts to the grieving family.

Balloon releases are a fairly common practice at funerals, especially when they’re conducted for children, funeral director Tom Sproles said.

“It’s obviously symbolic that as we’re releasing balloons to the sky, we’re also releasing our loved one as well to heaven,’’ he said.

But where some see a touching tribute, others spot a danger to birds and marine life.

Ted Siegler, who studies the amount of plastic waste that reaches marine settings as a partner at DSM Environmental Services in Windsor, Vermont, believes helium-filled balloons should be banned because they so often escape and end up in the ocean.

“It drives me nuts when I see them,’’ he said, “because inevitably they’ll bring them to children’s birthday parties, and it doesn’t take very long until someone loses the grasp and it winds up into the atmosphere and it disappears and you don’t know where it’s headed.’’

Latex balloons, typically synonymous with festive occasions such as birthday parties and graduations, have landed in the cross hairs of the environmental movement because of their potential to harm wildlife.

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Balloons don’t present nearly as big a pollution problem as plastics, which are estimated to make up 85 percent of the world’s marine debris: Items like beverage bottles, bags, cutlery, plates, straws and balloon sticks litter beaches, seas and waterways far and wide.

But the inflatable party staples have drawn more attention with the increased awareness of what happens to products released into the environment.

“They’re one piece of the puzzle,’’ said Emma Tonge, communications and outreach specialist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “They are a serious threat to wildlife simply because they are colorful and bright, so wildlife might mistake them for food, and the strings can wrap around their bodies and make it difficult for them to swim or breathe.’’

The success in recent years of campaigns to ban or discourage the use of plastic bags and straws raises the question of whether the once-seemingly innocuous balloons may join the list of verboten articles.

Five states – California, Connecticut, Florida, Tennessee and Virginia – already have forbidden mass balloon discharges, and several others have introduced bills aimed at limiting how many can be sent floating into the skies at once.

The Clemson Tigers, who won the college football national championship in 2016, this year discontinued their decades-long tradition of unleashing 10,000 orange balloons as the players took the field in a nod to the university’s sustainability efforts.

Will future birthday celebrants have to settle for streamers and banners while forsaking the pleasure of chasing and popping balloons?

Likely not, but it’s best to keep them contained.

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Dan Flynn, chairman of the Balloon Council, noted that the percentage of balloons let go in the environment is minuscule compared to how many are sold. He also clarified that balloons filled with air typically don’t rise high enough to present a problem.

The issue is with those inflated with helium or another gas lighter than air, whether they’re made from latex or the foil-and-polyester material commonly known as Mylar, because they can travel longer distances.

Mylar balloons, which conduct electricity, often get caught in power lines and have caused countless power outages – more than 1,000 last year in Southern California alone. The Balloon Council recommends they be sold only when tethered to a weight, following the requirement of a 1990 California law.

While Flynn said trade research has found no evidence of latex balloons by themselves causing harm to marine life – usually the animals have ingested plastic products as well – the industry has tried to educate customers about the proper way to handle them.

 “Our message to our retailers, to our users, is, ‘Don’t let go,’’’ Flynn said. “We recognize that, even though the product is biodegradable, some people are going to consider releasing a balloon to be littering. And while balloon releases can be very beautiful events, if you’re offending a lot of people by it, it’s not the thing to do.’’

There are varying estimates of how long balloons take to biodegrade, from six months to four years. They’re not among the 10 items the European Commission listed in May as targeted for bans or phasing out in an attempt to reduce marine debris.

That list is composed entirely of single-use plastics and it does include straws, which have been banned in Seattle, San Francisco and Vancouver, British Columbia. New York City is also pondering such a move.

Though straws account for just a fraction of the plastics content in landfills, environmentalists see their banishment as a means to raise awareness to the importance of finding ways around reliance on single-use plastics.

The issue has become even more pressing in the U.S. now that China has tightened the rules on what it will purchase and has threatened a tariff on other reclaimed refuse as it engages in a trade war with the Trump administration.

“Now more than ever, this stuff will go to landfill because the sort of contaminated recyclable material that especially California used to send to China, well, China’s not taking this anymore, so there’s just no market for it,’’ said Roland Geyer, an assistant professor of environmental science at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

Geyer was the lead author of a 2017 study that estimated only 9 percent of the 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic made since the 1950s has been recycled; nearly 80 percent ended up in landfills or somewhere in the environment.

Experts in the field see the next step toward sustainability not in recycling but in structural changes that would encourage producers and vendors to seek packaging alternatives that don’t rely on plastic, which is used for beverage containers, yogurt cups, peanut butter jars, shampoo bottles and more.

The old three-R slogan of reduce, reuse and recycle is giving way to reduce, reuse and refuse, the last one not the noun but the verb, meaning to turn down plastic.

“I’m hoping people wake up to the beauty of reusables and disengage from all of these throwaway to-go cups and this whole throwaway mentality that we’ve become acclimatized to, because it’s completely unsustainable,’’ said Dianna Cohen, CEO of the Plastic Pollution Coalition.

Given the greater urgency of addressing the worldwide plastics crisis, the movement toward getting rid of balloons – or at least further restricting them – doesn’t figure to take off for a while.

But much like plastic bags and straws, they could become subject to the kind of campaign that brings their use crashing down.

Sharon Dunwoody, a University of Wisconsin professor who studies the role of science, environment and health messages in mass media, doesn’t see that prospect as far-fetched.

“Balloons are a uniformly cheery item. You would certainly engage in a rigorous effort to communicate about the downsides,’’ she said. “I do think in a case like that, people could readily change their behavior, because balloons are not a life-or-death issue. They’re fun, they’re common. If you said to me, ‘Have balloons but don’t let them out of the house; don’t let them escape,’ that to me would be a very doable thing.’’