In all seriousness the main reason there are probably microplastics in your balls is because people are constantly driving around creating tire wear microplastics.
If you were to shred these balloons into microplastics they wouldn't even be a blip.
Important thing to say is that a significant chunk of the plastic in the Pacific Garbage Patch is fishing nets that are just dumped when they break instead of disposed on land. Nobody is there to watch them and it causes major problems.
Even more amazing is the way that river and lake has completely turned around. People kayak and fish on the river, lake is thriving, and more work is being done every year to improve it even more.
I was going to say, the Cuyahoga River is textbook ‘how to clean up a watershed’. The whole area is beautiful considering it was an industrial wasteland not that long ago.
Question about that. What about the riverbed? Sure the water is cleaner but all those pollutants don't just vanish right? What if you stirred up the mud under the water, would it stir pollution too?
This is pretty much what happened, everyone said never again and now you're not allowed to do this anymore. I don't remember the specifics of the law, but I remember this event was the catalyst.
We have to start taking more seriously crimes against the environment. Personally, I think every company should be responsible for removing whatever trash their whole business might generate. Be it by creating products that can be fully recyclable, adopting refill and zero waste policies, avoiding marketing campaigns that produce trash.... or be heavily fined. In the end, it will be a public cost to fix the damages.
We got Captain Planet in the 90's and growing up us kids were all about recycling and planting trees, the whole nine yards. Then later we grew up and learned it was all a corporation lie to pass the blame to us the consumer instead of the producer. Most of that recycling just got shipped somewhere else to get burned up or stayed here and we just buried it in landfills.
This. I work in a small shop but the amount of plastic we go through in a day is just sickening. One machine gets these little ceramic tiles on it, roughly 3000 1x1 tiles, and each one comes in its own little plastic package
The amount of plastic food packaging I used to deliver to some coffee shops is kinda mind-blowing when you think about it.
Huge box after box filled with plastic cups, lids, and straws... I used to imagine that instead of dropping them off at the coffee shops, I could just drive them straight to the landfill.
Week after week, month after month, a never ending stream of plastic waste layering this planet's geologic record.
Notice how they call the people who hold your ideals and take action on it, eco-terrorists? Its not the majour corporations causing the problems that are terrorists, its the lone activists that are the heinous criminals.
Thank you! All of these comment talking about the debris from the balloons themselves (which I'm not downplaying, this is a crime against nature), but helium is a very important, non-renewable resource. When these balloons pop, the helium will float up to the top of the atmosphere and get skimmed away by solar wind. We use helium for MRIs, asthma treatments, NMR machines, semiconductors, the list goes on. Much more important stuff than watching a ball float...
the coast guard is a government agency, the government released the balloons. 'they would have drowned no matter what' absolves everyone of responsibility.
The balloons may have not directly caused their deaths but they certainly prevented the Coast Guard from finding/rescuing them because all of the balloons in the water made it impossible to see if a person was there
Typically, a helium-filled latex balloon that is released outdoors will stay aloft long enough to be almost fully deflated before it descends to Earth. However, the Balloonfest balloons collided with a front of cool air and rain, which caused them to drop towards the ground while still inflated. The descending balloons clogged the land and waterways of Northeast Ohio. In the days following the event, many balloons were reported washed ashore on the Canadian side of Lake Erie, causing water pollution. Some people had misconceptions about the environmental impact of balloon releases, thinking that "the balloons would reach an altitude where they popped and disintegrated
Right, but they would still drop back to earth and leave a bunch of plastic everywhere. It was definitely made worse by them not deflating but it seems like the original plan is still far from “harmless”
I don’t know how old you are, so sorry if this is something you already knew, but back in the 80s when I was a kid, recycling was new, and the idea that plastics were as bad as they are was largely nonexistent. Heck, we used to do an annual balloon launch at my school.
We would fill out a card with our name, our school’s name, and our school’s address (imagine the safety concerns about this now!), tie the card to the balloon, then we’d go to the playground and launch them. The idea was someone would find the balloon, and mail the card back, so we could see how far the balloons went. I grew up in Western Michigan and I know we got more than a few back from Quebec.
So long story short, most people did think this was relatively harmless, back in the day.
yeah, i remember in 2nd grade we released 100 balloons for the 100th day of school. it was all pretty and we were so excited. then like two weeks later, the animal magazine we got for that month was all about how balloons and plastics can get in the ocean and kill our marine friends and we all cried.
I recall environmental movements advocating for people to move toward plastic grocery bags instead of paper bags in the 90s to save the trees, and other similar things.
My favorite thing when talking about pre-internet arguments is that people just believed the loudest person. "Breakfast burritos are a net loss because tortillas take too much heat to cook" or whatever BS was being argued. There wasn't a great way to just check so people believed whatever.
Then the internet came along and people still just believe whatever the fuck.
If the balloons were made from latex as stated in the wiki then there are no microplastics. Latex is biodegradeable, luckily. However there'd still be chemicals from coloring etc in there.
To put together what the other two have said. The latex was supposed to be more environmentally friendly, though it still breaks down into microparticles. Even then though, micro plastics was pretty much unknown to the wider community at the time. Ideally, the balloons all went up and the large majority nearly completely deflated in an expected area. Still pretty irresponsible to think that being at such the will of weather and nature that they weren't prepared for worse conditions.
Some people had misconceptions about the environmental impact of balloon releases, thinking that "the balloons would reach an altitude where they popped and disintegrated
But even if they "disintegrated" they'd still spread microplastics across the land. Did they figure the plastics just ceased to exist, somehow?
It was the 80s, we'd only just gotten people used to the concept that throwing your trash straight into nature wasn't great, and microplastics weren't even a thing people knew of, much less cared about.
Did they figure the plastics just ceased to exist, somehow?
yes. i don't think it's been until sometime in the last 10-15 years that a majority of people have come around to believing that our actions actually can have lasting impacts on the planet as a whole.
it used to be super common for people to just flick their cigarette butts out onto the street. i'm not bringing this up because cigarette butts were some kind of ecological disaster, but because it's a microcosm of the attitude(s) that got us into so much trouble. they didn't just drop the butts at their feet, they flicked them a few feet away. why? because if it isn't near them it isn't their problem.
1.5 million helium balloon scraps would be a problem in downtown cleveland. but spread across the state? neighboring states? ehhh. who would even notice, right?
If the balloons were made from latex as stated in the wiki then there are no microplastics. Latex is biodegradeable, luckily. However there'd still be chemicals from coloring etc in there.
Yes. “Out of sight, out of mind” is a very real thing for most people. Just look at our current society. Landfills, islands of garbage in the ocean, homelessness, etc. Humans love to practice cognitive dissonance for their own comfort.
Funny, i just finished a podcast about the disaster.
Would recommend to search for the picture of the lake too and think of the 2 fishermen who went missing. It was impossible to find them cause u couldn't differentiate between a life west and a red Ballon
The Plain Dealer, the largest newspaper in the area, did a few stories for anniversaries, like the 25th anniversary -
Environmentalists complained the balloons were pollutants; the Coast Guard, searching for a lost boater in Lake Erie, complained that balloons landing in the water hindered their search; and a Geauga County woman complained that balloons landing on her property spooked her prized Arabian horses.
They said that sometime around 2018, the narrative changed and it became known as a "disaster" or "tragedy" and they attribute it to a video The Atlantic posted. https://youtu.be/n0CT8zrw6lw
Good point, but I think it is only in the last few years that people have been questioning things like this. I was a teenager in 1986 and about the only thing recycled was glass bottles. I recently watched a documentary which spoke about wireless earbuds and how the charger is a sealed unit with a battery that can't be changed so the only EOL possibility is landfill. This absolutely had never even occurred to me. Sometimes you need to be told the bleeding obvious.
There are alternatives though, Fairphone is doing a great job in minimizing waste. I have the Fairbuds and the bigger Fairbuds XL and am very happy with them, especially since I know a degrading battery won't mean I have to buy a new set.
https://shop.fairphone.com/fairbuds
Because Cleveland wanted to put itself on the map for something. Then Cleveland took a good, hard look at Cleveland and had some honest conversations about the capabilities of Cleveland.
So they landed on releasing a lot of balloons because they honestly had nothing else.
generations from now, people gonna ask the same thing about our generation, like social media propaganda or the over consumer production of useless things, which is more severe than some balloon that got released once.
They were latex balloons, so it's rubber not plastic, and should break down relatively quickly. Still a really stupid idea and could've/did cause a lot of damage, but it wasn't the long term ecological disaster some people are making it out to be.
It baffled me that absolutely no one, like no one, during the whole planning process or procurement of the balloons.... Just went, yeah this would probably look cool but isn't it a bad idea?
I mean pretty much, all of this was commissioned by the Van Sweringen brothers in the 1920s (other than the buildings to the very far left), who were billionaires even at the time, when Cleveland was extremely wealthy. Believe it or not the Terminal Tower was at one point the second tallest building in the world hah. Cleveland has a lot more varying architecture now in sky scrapers. We also condemn balloonfest 😬
Didn't those ballons fall into the river/lake in the end which caused sailors to drown because their ship sank and SAR teams couldn't spot their lifejackets in all the ballon trash?
Chill out everyone! I've seen the actual footage of this- they all end up in Paradise Falls in South America. In fact the guy whose house is tied to the balloons ends up saving a rare bird!
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u/Knatem 2d ago
Is this why there are microplastics in my balls?