I decided not to write about this before the Fourth of July as to not be a buzzkill, but now that the festivities are over I’d like to point you in the direction of this article from the Los Angeles Times that discusses how awful for the environment fireworks are. Turns out the answer is “really bad.” In fact:

Throughout the Los Angeles region, concentrations of fine particles, or carbon soot, skyrocket for up to 24 hours after the Independence Day shows, reaching levels as high as those from wildfires. [...] Also, traces of poisonous metals, which give fireworks their bright colors, and perchlorate, a hormone-altering substance used as an oxidizer, trickle to the ground, contaminating waterways. One Environmental Protection Agency study found that perchlorate levels in an Oklahoma lake rose 1,000-fold after a fireworks display, and they stayed high in some areas for up to 80 days.

Yeah. That’s not really good at all. But because fireworks are so cool, we’re probably not going to stop using them anytime soon.

As I began reading this article, I thought to myself, “Huh. Disneyland has at least one fireworks show a day. That can’t be so good.” Turns out Disney already was, as per usual, twenty-five steps ahead of me, and actually commissioned the Los Alamos National Laboratory to create more environmentally-friendly fireworks. In addition to using some “ultra-low-smoke and perchlorate-free technologies,” Disney replaced explosive-based launchers with compressed-air launchers recently. These are good things. The bad thing is that these technologies cost ten times more than your run-of-the-mill fireworks that most small-time holiday celebrations can’t afford. So we’ll keep having fireworks displays that tend to leave quite a mess.