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How much wild life is killed by balloons? You know you have bacteria and mites living all over your skin---how much harm does it do? Is it worth worrying about?
The US is 5.3 x 10^15 sq ft. A deflated balloon is 3 x 10^-1 sq ft. How many deflated balloons does it take to significantly impact the environment?
For comparison, we lose 4.2 x 10^8 sq ft to the bulldozer each year. It would take 1.4 x 10^9 (that's 1.4 Billion balloons) to cover that area. Your house and yard deprives Nature of valuable habitat-- probably more than all the released balloons put together every year. A postage stamp lot is ~3000 sq ft-- or ~9000 deflated balloons.Do you have any plans to give it up and return that land to MotherNature?
Still think it's a problem worthy of our consideration? Do you think an Act of Congress is necessary to deal with it?
Yes. We can't do anything about the mites on our skin but it's easy to stop releasing balloons. Read the links above it's a real problem. It's also one that is easy to solve unlike the destruction of habitat. No one needs to release balloons but space may be needed for houses etc.
As for the biodegradable balloons, that won't solve the entanglement problem and animals may ingest them before they have a chance to degrade.
It is littering, dangerous to wildlife and dangerous to airplanes and so people!
I am glad I stumbled onto this thread. I thought I was the only "Grinch" when it came to releasing balloons. I, too, cringe every time I see one one the news or something. I never even thought about it being littering! I just felt deep down inside me that it was so harmful to critters, even sea animals. I can't stand the practice. Never thought of planes either but yes, getting sucked up into the engine...disaster.
When I was a kid, we did an experiment where we all released balloons with our name and address asking the finder to return them. They came back from all over the place, most were found in neighboring towns but one came from a place in Canada that was one 300 miles away. everyone got to pin their balloon to a map on a big bulletin board showing how far they had gone and the date they were found. Mine did not come back. I was the only one who did not get their balloon back. I felt like a loser.
Over the next 20 or so years I regularly released balloons with my name and address on them every chance I got, hoping one day one will come back.
Way long ago, my brothers and I were assigned to clean up after the church rummage sale. they gave away a helium balloon with each sale. They had a left over helium tank that was half full and already paid for but it had to be returned. We took turns inhaling the helium and talking funny and laughing. then we launched a number of balloons with names and addresses. Probably 50 or more. (None came back). Then we started tying clusters of balloons together and attaching small items left over from the rummage sale to them. As is the nature of early teen and pre-teen boys when they get together and get silly, we kept getting more and more extreme trying to outdo each other. Eventually, we filled garbage bags and began launching larger left over rummage sale items (mostly stuffed animals) with a note "A gift for you from heaven" attached. Probably went to far when we strapped 8 garbage bags filled with helium to an iron and launched it into the stratosphere. At the time we thought it was hilarious. Probably some nasty littering going on there.
Many years later, I still had yet to have a balloon returned. I lived in Balboa (Newport Beach) California. We had a balloon for some reason and I told my new wife my sad story from elementary school. We put our name and PO box and a stamp on the string and launched our balloon.
Nothing happened.
Two months later we got our balloon back in the mail. It came from San Francisco which was a surprise. However their note was a bigger surprise. They were hiking in the desert in Mexico near Cabo San Lucas and found our balloon laying in the desert sand. They had found it a month earlier but did not get around to mailing it for a while. I finally got my balloon back and it was found 1,100 miles away! I won!.
Now I could finally stop littering the world with released balloons.
No one needs to release balloons but space may be needed for houses etc.
.
Risk vs benefit.
I suggest that the actual risk of released balloons on the environment is extremely small (maybe any animal dumb enough to eat a balloon ought to haves its genes removed from the pool anyway) while
those releasing them find some benefit in it.
Houses do need to be built and some habitat sacrificed. At what point does human population pose a real, non-compensatable (is that a word?) risk to the environment? How many balloons?
I'm not really arguing balloons here, but the more general problem of deciding some thing or activity is "bad" before its effects & the ability to compensate are quantified. Remember even water or oxygen is poisonous at high enough concentrations.
BTW- I keep getting a "Page Not Found" from your govt links.
The links Rowen had did work before, what's the point? So do you think the balloons turn into fairy dust. Some have been found to kill wildlife, that's just the ones found however. There are probably thousands killed not found by a human and not documented.
There is risk associated with releasing balloons and no potential benefit (except photo ops?).
There is NO risk associated with NOT releasing balloons, but there is a potential benefit.
I get what you're trying to say, but we do a lot of things where the risk/benefit ratio is very different. Insurance costs a ton, but most of us still have it just in case. Seatbelts have real risks, but many of us wear them.
In this case, I see no downside to avoiding something that has shown to be bad, even if it's only a tiny bit bad. The Girl Scout in me, I guess.
Plus, there is evidence just the mirror effect can start a fire too. I find these things all over out in the forest and it's both maddening and sad that people want to long range litter something that takes forever to break down. https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/05/...power-outages/
Just because YOU don't see the benefit to releasing balloons, doesn't mean everybody must agree with you. (In truth, I haven't gotten any kind of thrill from releasing a balloon since I was 4y/o, but it takes all kinds, I guess.)
Again, please quantitate how much damage to the environment is actually caused by errant balloons. Not how much damage could be caused. Anecdotes don't count. Photo-shopped pictures don't count.
It's a common tactic of disingenuous groups with an ulterior motive to use some manufactured crisis to further their political agenda. They usually pick subjects that don't lend themselves well to direct, personal observation or data collection by the common man.
I doubt any real data on balloons exists-- I'm sure any examples of birds or turtles choking on them are purely anecdotal and don't occur in numbers large enough to accumulate a meaningful data base. Let me know if I'm wrong. I'm perfectly willing to change my mind.
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