Now don’t be fooled into thinking that if you live far from the sea you are exempted! Balloons can travel hundreds of kilometres. As the pH of most animals’ stomachs is not strong enough to break down balloon plastic, the balloons block the animals’ intestines and eventually the animal starves to death. The end result is a jellyfish-looking balloon carcass (see below), which is just too tempting for a lot of sea creatures such as birds, fish, turtles, dolphins, dugongs, and even whales, to ingest. When released into the sky they reach high altitudes, only to pop and return down to the earth. Helium balloons cause their own special type of enviro-hell. So superficially, over time old balloons may appear to be “breaking down”, but what is really happening is that the plastic is being broken up from macro to micro plastics, causing havoc on both a micro and macro level in the environment. So what’s the big deal about balloons?īalloons are no friend of the environment: they are made from non-biodegradable plastic that breaks up into smaller plastic pieces. I love a good party, but these plastic scoundrels just have to be uninvited. Now I don’t mean to be a party pooper, but after my research, I think it’s time we ditch our unhealthy obsession with party balloons. After getting a lot of press in the media, it was time for me to dive deep and determine exactly why balloons are so detrimental to the environment This week I’m starting with the eco basics. As the year progresses I’ll be sharing my new-found knowledge with you. If you have subscribed to Happy Mail, you would know that my new year’s resolution is to increase my environmental awareness and continue pursuing an environmentally-conscious lifestyle. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.Home Eco life Why are balloons bad for the environment? Why are balloons bad for the environment? Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior. Overusing our search engine with a very large number of searches in a very short amount of time.Using a badly configured (or badly written) browser add-on for blocking content.Running a "scraper" or "downloader" program that either does not identify itself or uses fake headers to elude detection.Using a script or add-on that scans GameFAQs for box and screen images (such as an emulator front-end), while overloading our search engine.There is no official GameFAQs app, and we do not support nor have any contact with the makers of these unofficial apps. Continued use of these apps may cause your IP to be blocked indefinitely. This triggers our anti-spambot measures, which are designed to stop automated systems from flooding the site with traffic. Some unofficial phone apps appear to be using GameFAQs as a back-end, but they do not behave like a real web browser does.Using GameFAQs regularly with these browsers can cause temporary and even permanent IP blocks due to these additional requests. If you are using Maxthon or Brave as a browser, or have installed the Ghostery add-on, you should know that these programs send extra traffic to our servers for every page on the site that you browse.The most common causes of this issue are: Your IP address has been temporarily blocked due to a large number of HTTP requests.