Our prettiest pollutant: just how bad are fireworks for the environment?

The bangs and fizzes of fireworks are rapidly replacing the chimes of Big Ben as the defining sound of New Year’s Eve celebrations in London, while around the world, city landmarks are becoming stages for increasingly spectacular pyrotechnic displays. Since the millennium, the popularity of fireworks has even extended into back gardens, where smaller fireworks or sparklers are lit up at the stroke of midnight.

Fireworks are great fun. We all enjoy guessing the colours of the rockets before they ignite in the sky, hearing the explosions echo off nearby buildings, or writing our names in light with hand sparklers.

But there is an environmental price to pay. Firework smoke is rich in tiny metal particles. These metals make firework colours, in much the same way as Victorian scientists identified chemicals by burning them in a Bunsen flame; blue from copper, red from strontium or lithium, and bright green or white from barium compounds.

Read the piece from The Conversation by a Senior Lecturer in Air Quality Measurement from King's College London, Gary Fuller - “Our prettiest pollutant: just how bad are fireworks for the environment?”

Losing Nemo? Wider effects of mass Great Barrier Reef bleaching emerge

Marian Wong, a marine
biologist at the University
of Wollongong, at
Lizard Island.

Bleaching in the world's reefs over the past couple of years is immediately evident from the stark images of corals shedding their myriad colours for a ghostly white.

While as much as half the corals of the Great Barrier Reef died during the marine heatwaves of 2016 and 2017, researchers are only now beginning to assess the toll on the many species that rely on corals for food and shelter.

"A lot of the attention is on the corals," Marian Wong, a marine biologist from the University of Wollongong, said. "The public's perception is that the fish are mobile enough to just swim away.”

Read Peter Hannam’s story from The Age - “Losing Nemo? Wider effects of mass Great Barrier Reef bleaching emerge.”