Let's innovate to litter

Con este artículo de Timo, nos despedimos hasta la vuelta de las vacaciones. Muchas gracias a todos los que de alguna manera han contribuido a este blog durante su primer año, escribiendo sobre sus temas de investigación e interés, leyendo los artículos y opinando sobre cambio climático y energía. Esperamos seguir contando con vosotros y crecer en el siguiente año. Hasta entonces, os deseamos unas felices vacaciones de verano.

Por Timo Gerres

These two pictures stand for so much that is wrong in our push toward a sustainable and climate-neutral future.

 

I took these photos at a wedding last weekend. You can see some of the 100+ guests equipped with helium-filled balloons, each containing a LED light bulb and a small (most likely lithium-containing) battery stack, creating a beautiful ambient light, soon to be released into the mild European summer night. 

Technology innovations are key to making our society energy, material and emission efficient. Cheap LEDs have allowed us to reduce the energy demand for lighting tremendously over the last decades, and only by lowering the cost of batteries can we change to renewable electricity for many use cases.

But all of these advances are good for nothing if we allow ourselves to come up with more and more applications that create more waste, contaminate even more and destroy our environment.

This night, more than a hundred balloons, most likely made from non-degradable material, carried hundreds of small toxic explodable LED + battery stacks into the night sky, most landing in the surrounding fields and meadows, rotting there for the years to come or worse ...

How can we prevent this in the future?

Most likely not by blaming the bride or groom, the best men/women or wedding planner who came up with this "great" idea. We cannot hold people accountable if they simply don't know better.  

I did a quick internet search in multiple languages, and every time Google returned the same results for "LED balloons". Amazon, AliExpress and the likes with sponsored links to the best offers for" your party's special touch". No information about all the harm and damage these balloons can cause.

But what about the companies responsible for my search results? How can companies that themselves are committed to the goals of Paris keep supporting the sale of such unsustainable products?

Well, the answer is not that simple. None of these companies tells the consumer to fill these balloons with a floating gas and release them into the air. Hence, doing the bad business blame game won't bring us anywhere. On the other hand, simply banning products because they are badly designed leads us down a dangerous path. Governments telling us what we can buy and what not might fail to make many understand how environmentally harmful it is to use and wrongly dispose these products.

However, what could be very effective are policies that make people aware of the crap they are buying and the consequences of misusing it. In Europe, energy efficiency labels are a common sight. Recently I noticed that more and more single-use products are labelled with a cute dying turtle label to make consumers aware that they contain plastic. That made me learn during my last trip to McDonald's that their environmentally friendly paper cups also contain plastics!  

So let's take this one step further. Label LED balloons as hazardous waste. Don't stop there but continue with all single-use products containing electronics. Create a visual logo that makes customers aware. Oblige companies to show these labels if promoting these products via their websites. The EU Ecodesign directive might provide the right framework for it.

...and then, only then, when we can assume that everyone buying these products should be aware of the damage they are doing to the environment, making those that keep littering responsible for the harm they are causing.

More than 24 hours have passed after these balloons were released. The one LED + battery stack I saved from flying into the air keeps blinking in my hand.