By Aarav Fatnani
Regardless of who we are, I can say, without any controversy, that most of us enjoyed bursting our Diwali firecrackers and fireworks. However, I cannot say that all of us enjoyed it because of the environmental concerns that arise from these colorful, well-designed mini explosions. These concerns will make many of us feel guilty - given the fact that we are headed towards an environmental crisis since our greenhouse gas emissions are on the verge of triggering several catastrophic positive feedback loops.
Fireworks contain gunpowder. Gunpowder is made from sulphur, charcoal, and saltpetre (potassium nitrate). This means that the explosion will release carbon dioxide, thus emitting greenhouse gases. One common statistic states an annual 60,340 tonnes of CO2 is released in the atmosphere from the United States alone. Much more from many other countries. To put that into perspective, this number is similar to the annual CO2 output of 12,000 cars. Sounds alarming, does it not? This calculation does not even include other gases that greatly harm the lungs and the environment.
This means that fireworks do have a significant carbon footprint. While all of this is alarming at first glance, we must note that fireworks are primarily used for festivals - not daily. Our goal is to save the environment so our solutions should not primarily target fireworks because there are several other day- to- day economic activities that dwarf the CO2 emissions of fireworks in any given year. Needless to mention, energy consumption is the largest source of greenhouse gases (75.6% worldwide and 37.6 gigatonnes released annually) and these emissions are what we can and must reduce in order to reach the 1.5 degrees Celsius target set by the Paris Agreement as the maximum acceptable temperature increase above pre-industrial temperatures. If a transition is made to solar, wind, hydroelectric or nuclear energy, these emissions will decrease greatly and decrease the demand for coal and oil, which reduces the environmental impact of mining (5.1 gigatonnes of CO2 released annually) as well. As previously mentioned, other gases released by fireworks harm lungs, but this can be solved by individual action, for those gases will diffuse within mere hours. Masks can be worn until then to block most gases from entering our respiratory tract.
As we have seen, the numbers from other sources are much more damaging than fireworks can ever be. It is of utmost importance to prevent ecological collapse, but even if everyone stopped using fireworks, very little would be achieved (in terms of numbers) and we would lose out on the most famous and celebrated aspect of Diwali. Hence, we shouldn’t feel guilty about bursting fireworks.
To solve all problems: everything should be done with a limit and if we limit our joys by bursting fewer firecrackers each year, we will not lose the essence of our festivals and meaningfully contribute towards our environment’s prosperity. From next year onwards, keep this in mind!
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