00:00When they burst, they look like, they can look like colorful foliage or jellies in the ocean.
00:07The animals go towards the balloon for food,
00:10and then if a ribbon's attached, then they end up getting tangled in that too.
00:22Sea turtles often eat them. It's the number one marine debris killer of seabirds,
00:28and they can cause harm to any animal they can come in contact with.
00:49The balloon industry markets the latex balloons as biodegradable, but that's not true. They last
00:56years in the environment. I still have some sitting in my backyard. I think it's going on
01:00eight years now, maybe even more. Latex balloons are the type of balloon
01:04most commonly found in the stomachs of dead animals.
01:15Me and my family, my parents and my sister, we've always just been outside enjoying nature and stuff
01:20and just always hanging out at the beach. And when we were younger, getting choked up,
01:27there wasn't that much garbage. And just as it goes on and on, there's just more and more garbage.
01:33And then we started finding balloons, and we were like, what the heck's going on?
01:38And it seemed like all the balloon pollution correlated with the rise of social media.
01:44Facebook and Instagram both started, I think, around like 2005.
01:54Balloons, you know, released in the middle of the country can land way out in the ocean.
01:59Balloons, you know, released out on the seashore can end up thousands of miles in the forests.
02:07Most people wouldn't litter balloons on the ground, but they don't think twice when letting them go.
02:12What goes up must come down, and everything has an impact.
02:30The Balloon Council was started in 1990 to basically fight any laws that came up.
02:39There was some Girl Scouts in New Jersey who wanted to start a law to ban balloon releases,
02:47and the Balloon Council started and put a kibosh to that. The Balloon Council is a very powerful
02:54lobby. People think the balloon industry is just a bunch of clowns, but it's not. They're
02:59money-hungry, greedy. They just want to keep pushing their product for as long as they can,
03:04and they want to keep people in the dark.
03:09They definitely started ramping up when Balloons Blow came along because we just like kind of put
03:22the information out there, and then we started our Facebook page and Instagram and like really
03:26spreading the word, and then so like people had the information to stop balloon releases in their
03:32area and just, you know, bring more attention to it. Emston University is a college over here,
03:39and they used to release balloons for I think like 40 years, and after seven years of campaigning,
03:46emailing, calling, doing posts, they finally ended their balloon release tradition.
03:52After 35 years, the school is ending its massive release of balloons.
03:56It's the latest sign of a rising environmental debate.
04:02A lot of people are releasing balloons for like awareness, for like medical issues, or like, you
04:15know, cancer, premature babies, and that type of thing, but they don't realize that helium is a
04:20finite resource, and it's needed in the medical industry. They need it for MRIs and like the
04:27incubators and stuff, and scientists warn we shouldn't be wasting it on balloons.
04:37There's many alternatives depending on like if it's for a celebration or memorial,
04:42but for like celebrations, you could do bubbles, pinwheels, ribbon dancers,
04:49memorials, maybe like planting a tree or like starting a flower garden or butterfly garden
04:55to promote more life. A lot of people suggest sky lanterns as an alternative, but those are
05:02deadly and harmful too. Luckily, more people are becoming aware of the impacts of balloons.
05:08It kind of like, you know, goes forward a little bit, goes back, goes forward. The balloon industry
05:12has like since changed their stance and don't necessarily encourage balloon releases anymore,
05:17but they're still pushing, you know, the balloon arches. It's still very, very wasteful, and we
05:24just don't need to be participating in that anymore when there's so many alternatives.
Comments