Why we need to rethink how we celebrate Mardi Gras

There’s never a bad time to visit New Orleans but Mardi Gras season is a particularly wonderful time to be there when the city puts on a blinding technicolor display of music, dance, glitter and beads… so many beads. Beads are to Mardi Gras what tinsel is to Christmas but the ubiquitous party favours might soon be replaced as city officials warn of their substantial environmental harm.

Beads are essential to Mardi Gras celebrations, especially on Fat Tuesday when cheap and colourful, shiny, plastic beads are handed out to the crowds who then wear them as garlands or use them to decorate the streets of New Orleans. It’s a tradition that stretches back to the early days of Mardi Gras in the late 19th century when bonbons were passed out to crowds. They were eventually replaced by nuts and then glass baubles, before plastic beads became the standard throwable Mardi Gras item in the 1960s.

But these cheap plastic carnival beads, which are made from contaminants, cause problems, collecting in the streets each year after being abandoned by party-goers when the sun goes down on the celebrations. According to National Geographic, the New Orleans sanitation department collected over 1200 tons of waste after the parades ended last year and a lot of it was carnival beads, pulled from clogged storm drains along the main parade route. When this year’s celebration ended in March, 46 tons of beads were found blocking the city’s storm drains.

In an attempt to address the problem, the city bought about 250 gutter filtering devices to prevent beads from clogging the catch basins before this year’s celebrations. But that’s only addressing half the problem. The city doesn’t have an official recycling programme for the festival so that burden is left to volunteer groups. The Young Leadership Council and non-profit Arc of Greater New Orleans (ArcGNO) set up 130 collection bins at 70 sites around the New Orleans metro area to collect beads that would otherwise have ended up in the sewers or lining landfills, with the intent of selling them back to parade organisers the following year.

Environmentally-friendly alternatives are becoming more popular with companies like Atlas Beads and Throw Me Something Green selling biodegradable paper beads. Naohiro Kato, a biological sciences professor at Louisiana State University, is hoping to introduce biodegradable algae-based beads but it might be a while before they’re introduced to the market. And they’re not exactly cost-effective. He explained to Huffington Post they’d cost up to ten times more than plastic beads although he is working towards ways to make them more affordable.

While it may be a while before biodegradable beads become mainstream it’s clear that attitudes need to change soon to embrace a more socially-responsible celebration.

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