300 million lbs of fireworks and 2.7 billion dollars gone in a cloud of smoke.
A local, professional display uses about 80lb of gunpowder (NEQ). When combusted this will produce about 40lb of CO2. To put this in context, most new internal combustion engines will produce about 190gm of CO2 per mile.
Therefore a single car would need to travel 88 miles to emit the equivalent amount of CO2 of your typical fireworks display. If you consider the a round trip distance for the entire audience to watch a single fireworks display, gunpowder is a fraction of the CO2 footprint.
The problem is pollution, not GHG emissions. Particles, NOx, Plastic debris…
On top of that your local fauna is not at all prepared for the nosie and light pollution.
Again, probably more particles, NOx, Plastic debris etc. from the audience.
Any football game with a flyover is multiple times more polluting.
i am quite certain that people do not emit particles or NOx like this. In particular nobody is just exhaling heavy metals.
Here is a map for New Years in Germany with a nice slider. Particle concentration increases up to 1000x the base-value of that day (which already includes people setting off fireworks earlier)
https://gis.uba.de/website/silvester/
Unless it is normal for people at football games to ignite pyrotechniques, or they all smoke 5 packs of cigarettes each during the game, there is nothing that would make a comparable pollution.
Nice.
Now do the calculation that includes all of the direct suffering to humans, pets, and wild life, and then quantify all of the solid and liqueous waste associated with generation, transportation, and utilization, the latter including all of the waste associated with spectators attending the phenomenon.
What I think we’ll all discover is that private transportation and the lack of robust recycling infrastructure and waste recovery the world over sucks. We should all do something about it.
