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Jul 3, 2009 12:00 PM | 4
Red, white and blue aside, how green will this weekend’s firework festivities be? Not very, argue some.
The dazzling displays owe their colors to traces of metal compounds: strontium for red, aluminum or magnesium for white, copper for blue and barium for green.
What happens when these chemicals come raining down on rivers, lakes and people? “Everyone at or downwind of a pyrotechnic display is getting subjected to levels of these metals that aren’t natural,” Los Alamos Natural Laboratory chemist David Chavez recently told Discovery News.
Waterways, often selected as launching sties to help decrease fire risk, show a spike in perchlorates (up from .08 to 44.2 micrograms per liter) after Fourth of July, a 2007 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) study found. Perchlorates, which are used to help the fireworks’ fuel burn, were named in an EPA health advisory earlier this year (which recommended a maximum of 15 micrograms per liter of drinking water), as they have been linked to disruption of the thyroid gland.
Not to rain on your patriotic parade plans any more, but you can’t count on recycling the smoky remnants either: “Fireworks after they’re shot off are usually pretty dirty,” a policy analyst for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality told Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Researchers still don’t know exactly what—if any—lasting ill effects fireworks may have on the Earth or the body. If anything, the biggest health concerns remain the same: choking on smoke and blasting off a finger. So set off—or observe—those fireworks with caution.
Read more about what makes fireworks go bang in our Ask the Experts about how they work.
Image courtesy of RKHawaii via Flickr
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4 Comments
Add CommentAlas for copy editors. Launching sties ought to be launching sites, and LANL is Los Alamos National Laboratory, not a Natural Laboratory.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAE
Alas for copy editors. Economic pressures are visible in the mistakes that reach readers. "Launching sties" should be launching sites, and the laboratory is Los Alamos National Laboratory, not Natural Laboratory.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article doesn't offer any perspective on perchlorates: it would be interesting to know what else might be adding them to drinking water. I suspect that fireworks are the least of our worries for sources of perchlorate pollution.
AE: the only large scale use of perchlorate is as an oxidizer for solid propellants. That's why most perchlorate exposure is often found at missile fabrication, storage, and launch sites.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is only one known large natural deposit of perchlorates in the world...in the Atacama desert of Chile. Thus, the only way the perchlorates are getting in waterways is logically as a result of the fireworks.
@ Porcine aviator
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOr NASA Launchings. Eh?
Fourth of July sparkies or shuttles? Which do *you* think pollutes more?