"The iconic New Orleans party favors are getting an eco-friendly makeover."
"In New Orleans, it’s not Mardi Gras without the beads. It’s a nearly 200-year-old tradition for parade marchers to treat the huge crowds to freebies, which have evolved from glass baubles and nuts to today’s plastic jewel-tone beads. On Fat Tuesday, the beads are nearly ubiquitous, as they’ve come to symbolize the celebration. But when the party’s over, the beads linger.
One scientist has proposed a solution that could make Mardi Gras beads biodegradable. If his idea comes to fruition, it could save the city time and money on cleanup and cut down on post-celebration landfill trash.
In a 2017 cleanup project, workers removed 93,000 pounds of beads from storm drains in the mansion-studded blocks of historic downtown New Orleans. Before this year’s celebration, the city bought about 250 gutter filtering devices to prevent beads from clogging the catch basins along the parade’s route. While the filters will ostensibly keep beads out of the storm drains and prevent flooding, they can’t save the beads from their ultimate fate. Close to 1,200 tons of trash were collected post-parade in 2018, most of which ended up in landfills."
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