BEAD AWARE Mardi Gras beads should be tossed (aside) By Kate Stevens
Garcia also finds it wasteful that so many of these unwanted plastic throws end up in the gutter, the storm drains and the landfill. That’s why for Mardi Gras 2019, Garcia has purchased specialty throws from Atlas Handmade Beads, a New Orleans company that sells necklaces and bracelets made of recycled magazine paper from women in Uganda. She has purchased fewer plastic throws as a result and hopes these unique, colorful necklaces from Atlas are ones people will actually wear as keepsakes. “I’d rather have less to throw, but what I’m throwing people want,” says Garcia. Garcia is part of a growing movement to make Mardi Gras more environmentally friendly, less wasteful and with fewer of the plastic throws and toys that studies have shown contain harmful substances like lead and chemical flame retardants. “It’s not just about a cultural shift,” says Katrina Brees, founder of Kolossos, a sub-krewe using bicycles as homemade floats and whose riders pass out artisan throws and edible New Orleansbased snacks. “It’s actually about a toxic health hazard, and a lot of people are beginning to understand that. [Beads are] shifting from being a symbol of happiness to a symbol of sadness, and people feel that.” And there are plenty of beads. Twenty-five million pounds, or 12,500 tons, of them are thrown during the Carnival season from Twelfth Night to Mardi Gras, according to a 2013 report on potential lead exposure from Mardi Gras beads and parade route environments. “This is a time when we certainly have to think about the planet that we’re living on and the impact parades have on the city of New Orleans,” says Howard Mielke, a professor in the pharmacology department of the Tulane University School of Medicine and co-author of the lead exposure report. “The parades are wonderful. I love them. We just have to make sure to find a way to make them kinder to the environment and to the health of our children.”
Plastic beads left in the gutter as garbage become an environmental nightmare. In January 2018, the city of New Orleans announced it had retrieved 7.2 million pounds of trash and debris, including 93,000 pounds of Mardi Gras beads, from city catch basins during a four-month cleaning project along a five block stretch of St. Charles Avenue.
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Mary Anne Garcia has ridden in the Krewe of Iris for years, and while the joie de vivre and excitement of Carnival has remained the same, she has seen a change among spectators. They don’t want the same old plastic throws they can get at any parade. “I have found over the last few years, these plastic beads, these big ones that used to be so flashy, nobody really wants them, you throw?” says Garcia, 63, of Metairie. “They’ll drop to the ground. They want something different now.”
And, every year, between 4,500 and 8,000 tons of trash is collected during Mardi Gras just in the French Quarter, according to VerdiGras, a volunteer group seeking to encourage a more green, more sustainable Mardi Gras celebration. While the amount of trash Mardi Gras creates is obvious to parade-goers, the fact that many plastic Mardi Gras throws contain lead levels exceeding federal safety guidelines is less obvious. This hidden danger can be toxic for children who may place the beads in their mouths or pick up beads from the dirty ground which also has been proven to have high lead levels.
So what’s inherently harmful with the plastic in Mardi Gras throws? These plastic Mardi Gras throws contain small amounts of chemical toxins, according to a 2013 report produced by Healthystuff.org and the Ecology Center, a Michigan-based nonprofit, environmental organization, in collaboration with VerdiGras. “As a physician mom, I always felt like the beads smelled funny,” says Dr. Holly Gore Groh, founder of VerdiGras, and a New Orleans mother of four children. “We tried to keep them out of my children’s mouths.” Groh says she knew in her gut something was wrong with the makeup of the beads. So she contacted the research director of Healthystuff.org where scientists soon analyzed the Mardi Gras beads Groh provided. Scientists screened 87 Mardi Gras bead necklaces, bracelets and other accessories and found more than 60 percent of the products tested, or 56 of 87, had concentrations of lead above 100 ppm, or parts per million.
january/february 2019 | www.nolafamily.com
| january/february 2019
These harmful plastics can work their way to our waterways and oceans where they can affect animal and plant life and ultimately humans, says Mielke.
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