In your July 29, 2021, editorial, “Airing It Out In Swampscott,” you “urge” the Swampscott Conservation Commission, which temporarily banned balloon use at the town’s Linscott Park, to focus on educating the public “in the hopes” of mitigating environmental damage caused by balloons and balloon releases.
Education and hope are less effective than imagined. At the Commission’s July 22, 2021 meeting, guest Lorna O’Hara, the executive director of the Balloon Council, stated that the organization — composed of balloon manufacturers, sellers and distributors — has spent three decades educating others about the proper handling of balloons.
Yet, balloon debris, observed for the past 14 years along the New England coast during whale-watch studies, comprised 37.3 percent of the almost 1,000 pieces of trash in the area. Relying on advocacy and instruction by so-called balloon professionals may be counterintuitive, at best.
The Item’s editorial also misleads the reader by suggesting that private property would be included in any proposed ban by a Swampscott entity. That is not the case. Furthermore, the editors believe that the goal of enforcement is too “lofty,” and so should be “relegated to public-education campaigns akin to those currently aimed at the threat plastic bags pose to marine animals.”
Considering their own newspaper’s report, I doubt that the editors are unaware of the many bans on single-use plastic bags. At least 144 Massachusetts municipalities limit or no longer allow several single-use products, including plastic bags, and statewide legislation on the subject is advancing.
There’s no such thing as safe disposal of balloons, whether or not they are released into the atmosphere. We throw away our plastic, yet it still finds its way to the ocean, where the litter is ingested by more than 200 marine animal species, including whales, seals, fish, turtles and seabirds.
According to Scientific Reports, balloons and their debris kill almost one in five seabirds that eat them. Although balloons comprise just 2 percent of ingested litter, seabirds are 32 times more likely to die from eating pieces of balloons than from consumption of hard plastic fragments. Cutting up balloons and containing them in a trash bag may seem like safe disposal, but it’s not.
Regarding the balloon-weight-recycling program mentioned in your opinion piece: We should not be concerned with anchoring balloons when helium is in short supply.
A full 10 percent of this nonrenewable resource goes to filling party balloons, when it should be preserved for its need in medical diagnostics, physics and chemistry research; manufacture of computer chips; weather forecasting and other activities far more essential.
The editors championed the human “joy” and “celebratory levity” provided by balloons. A sad commentary, indeed, to favor a moment’s pleasure over the slow deaths endured by the wildlife that may innocently swallow or become entangled in our needless balloon debris.
Maybe the best education for the public would come from our children, if we dare to ask them what’s more important: holding a string tied to a colored piece of floating plastic or the life of an animal?
Deb Newman is a Swampscott resident and Swampscott Conservancy member.
