Gone with a puff of smoke, flash of colored light & usually a loud bang noise, pyrotechnic devices rely on a mix of oxidizing chemicals like potassium nitrate or potassium perchlorate to provide oxygen to give electrons to metal powders that readily accept the electrons while becoming metal oxides. Sadly, these metal oxide powders form super fine soot dust that blows around great distances causing air pollution as particulate matter & then eventually rains down onto the Earth, which is 7/10th covered in water, where they become water pollutants.
Fires caused by aerial fireworks cause many homes & buildings to be destroyed, in fiery blazes that release even more air pollutants. Fireworks sometime cause wildfires, which destroy ecosystems while releasing air pollution.
Fireworks sometimes cause vehicle & personal accidents, including people having their fingers blown off as they try to hold an M80 or salute in their hand while the fuse burning down close to the ignition point, with the idea of throwing the small binary powder explosive mid-air to realize an air burst & report & bright flash, like a flashbang grenade. Misjudging the ignition timing, the device explodes in their hands, the power of aluminum powder becoming aluminum oxide releasing a ton of gas pressure, heat, & light, as the flesh of their hands rips apart. These people usually end up in hospital emergency rooms, often teens, & this among other reasons, why Cherry Bombs & M80s were made illegal in most areas of the United States.
The common perchlorate oxidizers used in many fireworks are toxic to people's thyroid gland & aquatic wildlife important to commercial fishing. Combustion, deflagration, & low grade less energetic explosions typical of loud fireworks, also chemically imperfect, so some of the fine dangerous metal powders & toxic oxidizer does not react, releasing both into the biosphere where it gets into the lungs of everything breathing, raining down toxic dust onto plants, including in agriculture onto foods being produced, eventually becoming water pollution in creeks, streams, rivers, tributaries, estuaries, lakes, oceans & other bodies of water on Earth's surface. All of the pollution problems from fireworks are similar to those from combustion of fossil fuels like coal, diesel, gasoline, natural gas & other petrochemical fuels that emit air polluting exhaust fumes & soot full of substances toxic to the human lung, brain, kidney, and liver cells.
The higher temperature reactions produced by engines, turbines, motors, anything the burns fuel, coke fueled furnaces, wood burners, fireworks, they all rely on combustion happening in a nitrogen rich atmosphere. Earth's biosphere air comprised mostly of Nitrogen N2 gas, ~78% of air made of nitrogen. When the nitrogen in air reacts with high temperature combustion reactions, it forms toxic NOX or oxides of nitrogen, like orange/ brown colored smelly toxic nitrogen dioxide or NO2 emitted from volcanos, forest fires, vehicle tailpipes, & coal power plant emissions. Oxidation of sulfur present in fireworks & some fuels, produces toxic SOX emissions. Fine & super fine PM or particulate matter emissions are also released by combustion.
Like fire, fireworks & engines & motors & turbines & other combustion driven events & devices & phenomenon are some of the few examples of a "Chemical Reaction" that people can see with their color eye retina-based brain relayed perceptual memory reference visual system. Much of the light emitted by combustion released as invisible to human eyes IR or infrared. A SEEK thermal camera dongle plugged into the charging port of your Smartphone can image the IR emissions. FLIR of forward-looking infrared enables color visualization of IR so that humans can see IR in colors that our eyes recognize. This is called false colorization & NASA has to do lots of this with multi-spectral imagining of celestial objects, so that people can look at color image representations of those non-visible frequencies.
Fireworks a low explosive pyrotechnic device utilized to entertain viewers with fireworks shows or displays. Like watching metal forging or glass working, the heat & light & sounds are engaging. Noise, light, smoke & floating confetti are the main four common display features of most fireworks. Typically, fireworks are used as part of celebrations like The Fourth of July in America (4th of July). Many celebrations throughout the world make use of fireworks displays. This makes the pollution emissions from fireworks a global environmental & public health problem.
Typical fireworks either ground effect, like a fountain, firecrackers, or roman candles. Launched solid rocket motor bottle rockets, or aerial shell launched by a mortar (or smaller festival ball)(we use the powerful Excalibur sky mortar kit) or SRM skyrockets that form sky displays typically of fireworks shows or 4th of July block party display which large 500-gram "cakes" are setoff. Invented in China to celebrate the Chinese New Year and Moon Festival, today China the largest maker of fireworks & largest exporter of fireworks.
Newer silent fireworks providing all of the visual flare without the loud reports or explosive sounds, are becoming popular. The loud shells were originally designed to simulate artillery & warfare noises. The very loud burst & explosion noises emitted by typical fireworks traumatize people with PTSD who fought in violent armed conflicts. Animals in nature are terrorized by the sounds, pollution, and most common pets, especially dogs, with their very sensitive sense of smell, and cats with their high sensitivity hearing, & other pets- are frightened, alarmed, and stressed out by loud fireworks.
Heavy metals, sulfur-coal compounds, and other toxic chemicals like antimony sulfide and arsenic are released by fireworks. The debate about firework pollution obscured because of the larger emissions of pollution from burning fossil fuels, making it difficult to study or collect useful data other than anecdotal reports from fishermen whose occupation disrupted by the temporary increase in toxic heavy metal & metal oxides & perchlorate salts raining down into the waters where they are fishing, killing the fish with water pollution. Water soluble perchlorate salts rapidly move into ground & surface waters, in the human body they block the thyroid gland from absorbing iodine. People with asthma, COPD, and other breathing disorders typically find that the smoke from fireworks aggravates their health problems.
The solid debris of color paper & plastics left behind by fireworks creates a considerable amount of dusty, dirty, foul-smelling solid waste. When you compare the toxic emissions from fireworks to those created by burning fossil fuels, the fireworks pollution issue might seem insignificant, but just like every item on your grocery lists, it adds up. With climate change, every source of emission must be considered & addressed to reduce air & water pollution & also so that we decarbonize energy, including making non-toxic fireworks that are perchlorate free & silent or low noise fireworks. Everything, including fireworks can be improved to reduce pollution emitted. More applied intelligence can reduce pollution emissions.
Coal emissions release greatly more heavy metal emissions than fireworks for example. At least with stationary 24/7 coal electrical power reactors, the exhaust stack emissions can be filtered & processed with emissions controls, like a Swedish dust bagging system, urea injection, & electrostatic filtering. The fly ash emissions in coal soot contain most of the toxic heavy metals. Coal contains radioactive metals like uranium, thorium, and neurotoxic metals like mercury, and lead. When coal burned, these metals are boiled off or oxidized into ash, a super fine ash propelled by the enormous amounts of CO & CO2 rushing out of the coal stack as carbon emissions that drive climate change. These toxic heavy & radioactive metal ashes are blown around everywhere near the coal power reactors, sometimes moving 10s, hundreds, or thousands of miles away, by way of stratospheric air currents.
There exists an urgent need to decarbonize energy, to reduce air pollution, & to slow down climate change. Just the public health damage from breathing fossil fuel combustion emissions makes gasoline & diesel enormously more costly. Government & healthcare companies end up paying for the negative externalities of combustion energy emissions in other ways. Looking at the nation's budget, wholistically, like personal financial accountability, those carbon emissions are causing future debt, mostly in the form of "out of control rising healthcare costs in the United States", but also because its damaging nature where our air, water & food comes from. Toxic emissions are bad for the Earth's environments, and bad for public health.
Everything in the environments of Earth connected. There is only us, one human people on Earth, and only 1 Earth. We are cheating our children, & future generations burning carbon at the Terawatt or greater scale. What kind of environment do you want to leave for your grandchildren? Does making the air & waters of the world toxic with pollution sound kind, nice, ethical, or moral to you? Does causing runway climate change that destroys lives and environments, and makes Earth less hospitable to people, making life harder and less pleasant for everyone, does that sound good to you?
I loved fire, and fireworks as a child, teen, and early adult. I even handmade a small number of loud bright salutes using fine dark German aluminum powder & potassium perchlorate (precise mass mix instructions from online), purchased online; carefully diaper folding mixed outdoors with PPE during humid weather to reduce static ignition hazard. I would load this flash powder inside of handmade cardboard tubes made by wrapping grocery bag paper coated in a thin layer of wood glue around a metal pipe, specifically an acid etched titanium mandrel that I had previously coated in a microscope layer of platinum for electrochemical electrolysis using DC current at lower voltages & higher amperage, and mostly to plate iron & steel parts with nickel metal to make them corrosion resistant. I would slide remove these glued brown paper tubes, and air dry them for weeks to enable them to harden. The glued paper fiber tubes became strong like a composite pipe. I would then stuff newspaper into a small cup to make a plug, then hot glue this plug into one end of the cardboard tubes. I then drilled a small hole into the side of the tube to enable the installation of a 4-inch segment of green triple liquored cannon fuse, purchased online. The flash powder was then weighed up using a precision scale, and carefully folded paper funnel loaded into the carboard tubes. Another pre-pressed newspaper plug was then installed in the other end slowly & carefully so as to not cause a friction ignition of the sensitive flash powder. Finally hot glue was used to seal both ends of the tube. The salute was then allowed to cure, a sharpie pen was used to label the powder weight of each craft made custom solute, somewhere between 1-8 grams of flash powder in each salute. I would bring these salutes to a 4th of July party & set them off to entertain the guests. These ground burst salutes produced a powerful sound & bright flash emission that greatly amused most people while upsetting others.
I stopped making salutes and stopped buying fireworks a few years after Meg and I got married. Meg likes camping fires, the warm orange yellow & red light & warm IR emissions & soft crackling sounds & smell of wood smoke, but she dislikes loud toxic fireworks made in China. Not buying fireworks also keeps us from burning our money, part of ongoing financial accountability, saving & investment philosophies & goals to be obtained. As an environmental scientist, I could no longer be dishonest with myself about the toxic emissions from fireworks. This is part of why I wrote this posting, to undo the damage I caused by buying, making & setting off fireworks. My right-hand pointer finger has a very unusual burn scar that distorted my fingerprint, caused by a fuse burn. Fuses can send a jet of hot expanding gas outward when first ignited, and in one incident among many, my pointer finger passed in front of the just then ignited fuse where the burning hot stream of combustion emissions burned my finger badly, with a charred 3rd degree burn right in the middle of the pointer fingers fingerprint area. Breathing all of that soot & smoke probably not healthy either, so I gave it up for lots of reasons.
Yes, climate change from burning fossil fuels a much bigger & more important topic, especially because of the vastly larger scale of global energy & transportation air pollution emissions that are making climate change worse faster & having a costly negative effect on public health. Like I said before, we need to address e-waste, fireworks, trash & recycling, mining & manufacturing, energy & all other emission generating sectors & industries, to reduce pollution & clean up Earth's environments to make life cleaner & better for all People & all Animals in nature & for the future wellness of Planet Earth!
