Birthday parties, sporting events, and weddings have one major thing in common. They are all excellent venues to let off an enormous amount of helium-filled balloons.
While beautiful and sometimes impressive, it is also illegal in many states and constitutes littering. Many cities and states have laws banning the release of helium-filled balloons including, “California, Connecticut, Florida, Tennessee and Virginia. Cities that have laws include Ocean City, Maryland; Louisville, Kentucky; Huntsville, Alabama; San Francisco, California; Nantucket, Massachusetts, and Baltimore, Maryland.”
This time of year brings about a lot of gift-giving and even more questions about whether certain things are recyclable.
Gifts are generally given in one of, or a combination of, the following: gift bags, various types of gift wrap, ribbon, and bows. Technically few of which are recyclable.
Wrapping paper, made primarily of, well…paper, seems to beg to be put into your recycling bin after use just by virtue of the fact that paper is one of the most commonly recycled commodity.
The reality, however, is that “including it in the bin with other paper products can make an entire load unrecyclable.”
Many of today’s commonly used wrapping paper is made with foil or thin layers of plastic coating the paper and some tissue paper contains acid, making it a less desirable item to recycle.
“Lithium batteries are disposable batteries that have lithium metal or lithium compounds as an anode.” An anode is the positively charged electrode. Lithium-ion batteries are their rechargeable counterparts.
Non-rechargeable lithium batteries had been in the works since the early 1900s but made their way into markets being commercially available in the early 1970s.
Birthday parties, sporting events, and weddings have one major thing in common. They are all excellent venues to let off an enormous amount of helium-filled balloons. 
