The Not-So-Colorful Side of Mardi Gras Beads

What if I told you that Mardi Gras celebrations in 2018 produced roughly 1,200 tons of waste? That’s more than1/10 of the Eiffel Tower’s weight (made of iron).

Long after people stop throwing beads during Mardi Gras, their effects can still be felt (and not in a good way).

Lead in the soil from years of chemical leaching. Beads clogging a quarter of the storm drains. Those don’t sound as fun as giant daiquiris and extravagant floats, but they remain a staple of the celebration nonetheless.

As I made the 12-hour drive from Chapel Hill, NC to New Orleans, LA on the first weekend of March, I was filled with some conflicting emotions.

Amidst all my excitement about seeing a new city and old friends, I felt rather guilty for not only participating in such a wasteful (yet awesome) celebration but also for driving far to do so.

One of my friends that I drove up with is also an environmental major, so despite the festive circumstances (and drinking), the waste around us was being thought about or discussed for much of the trip. Honestly, the more we drank, the more we talked about it.

As we made our way from parade to parade, witnessing the short-lived excitement as people tried to catch beads and toys being thrown from the floats, we were painfully reminded of one of the golden rules of Mardi Gras (It’s ACTUALLY written under the French Quarter website as Bead Rule #1) –

You don’t pick up the fallen beads.

With a top rule like that, it’s rather hard to encourage people to not waste beads. Fortunately, we saw some purple mesh bags with a recycling symbol on them, so we started asking people how they felt about the waste and recycling that results from the parades.

One woman declined to give us her name, but she said that she doesn’t wish that the celebration could be more sustainable because it brings people together, and its cost falls only on those making floats and the city.

So, people don’t care about how much waste they make as long as it doesn’t cost them money? Wonder where I have heard that before.

With a clean-up process that takes hundreds of people days, sometimes even months, it seems inevitable that the city would eventually be forced to seek out alternative solutions as each celebration brings more, people, more beads, and more waste.

If you’re still not worried about it, let me hit you with some numbers.

From September 2017 to January 2018, nearly two dozen vacuum trucks collected roughly 7.2 million pounds of debris around the city, with more than 46 tons of beads collected from merely a five-block chunk of street (St. Charles Avenue).

The city of New Orleans had to spend $7 million on an emergency contract to flush out 1/4 of the city’s 68,000 catch basins because they were clogged with beads last year.

This year, the city temporarily blocked the drains during festivities as a solution, but why are we not focusing on the root of the problem? Just because the beads aren’t clogging stormwater drains doesn’t mean their presence isn’t still harmful.

While I was disappointed by the city’s efforts to make Mardi Gras more sustainable, that left room for the community to step in. Despite the mission of a local nonprofit having nothing to do with reducing waste, Arc of Greater New Orleans (ArcGNO) collects and recycles beads as a method of fulfilling its primary goal.

The organization fights to secure work and life opportunities for intellectually disabled people, so they may live up to their fullest potential. ArcGNO set out the purple bags along parade routes for people to place unwanted beads and toys in, which its employees would later sort and re-sell.

Some are finding other approaches to reusing when it comes to Mardi Gras.

From locally produced necklaces with beads that are toxin-free and can be recycled through the city’s systems to hand-painted bracelets made from recycled newspapers, locals are working to come up with sustainable solutions to the celebration’s plastic problem.

These problematic beads are known as “throws” and, unfortunately, the impacts of their creation, use, and disposal reach all the way across the world and last much longer than the week-long celebration in NOLA.

The plastic most beads are made from is created by turning mined oil and petroleum into polystyrene and polyethylene. The raw plastic then makes its way from the Middle East over to China.

Mardi Gras: Made in China is a documentary that follows the life-cycle of Mardi Gras beads from a small factory in China to the celebration in New Orleans. Each year, 25 million pounds of plastic beads are sent to the U.S. with the great majority of them coming from China and going to Louisiana.

https://vimeo.com/87231218

Many teenagers can be found working in the factories. They are required to reach a daily quota of 200 necklaces, but they are fined for any mistakes that result from rushing.

This is why life-cycle analysis is such an important approach. Most people eagerly seeking out beads on Bourbon Street probably have an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality, never considering all the harmful impacts of the cheap necklaces or where they came from beyond the person that tossed them off the floats. While the aftermath of so much waste was definitely on my mind, I never stopped to think about how the beads made it to NOLA.

A couple of necklaces on the ground is one thing, but a Tulane professor is studying the impacts of what amounts to nearly 4,000 pounds of lead being tossed on the street.

The collective effects of this have potential health implications for the soil along the parade routes as well as those who handle the beads before, during, and after Mardi Gras.

People who handle the beads are being exposed to a light dusting of lead as well as other toxins like arsenic, mercury, and chlorine (and we all know how kids like shoving everything in their mouths).

These effects only get worse with time because the beads are meant to be temporary, which is why we can’t rely on recycling as the solution to this problem.

The best solutions seem to be either reverting back to times when beads were ornately made of glass and coveted as precious instead of disposable or looking ahead to innovative solutions like algae-based or paper biodegradable beads.

It’s not that we don’t have sustainable options, they just aren’t cost-effective enough to be competitive yet. Increasing demand for sustainable practices and attention to the problem can allow them to be cheapened as the process increases in scale.

Ultimately, biodegradable beads seem like the best choice because they don’t depend on the compliance of people in safely disposing of them, and they don’t create long-lasting waste.

A mass shift to biodegradable beads is far from happening, but a perspective change could still have some positive effects in the meantime. Throwing beads didn’t even become a part of the Mardi Gras tradition until the 1880s. But at the time, they were made of glass and considered more precious.

As more people revert back to that mentality and focus on choosing beads that others will actually try to catch and not let fly right past them, there might be some hope for the celebration to change its ways. It’s not enough to just make them seem less disposable, but it’s a step in the right direction.

All waste aside, it was an absolutely incredible experience and I had the best time. I just hope that in the future, it can be one that won’t have to come with so many downsides because you can celebrate without being wasteful.

Happy Mardi Gras!

S.