Before you buy a metallic balloon, you may want to consider what happens to it after the celebration.
"800,000 people in the Southern California service area lost power due to metallic balloons just last year," said David Eisenhauer, SoCal Edison.
Eisenhauer stresses the importance of weighting and securing metallic balloons to avoid interaction with electrical wires
"This is a good example right here… You’ve got powerlines above you. It would be very easy for a metallic balloon to float into that powerline and cause an outage or a fire," he explained.
Metal conducts electricity which is why metallic balloons pose such a high risk for causing outages — it just takes one ballon touching two wires.
Kimberly and Charles Ray of the Marine Conservation Network add that loose balloons are generally bad for the environment.
"All balloons, when they end up in the ocean, especially, get ingested by whales, dolphins, and sea turtles because they look like jellyfish, and especially the metallic ones, which causes starvation," Ray said.
If you do purchase metallic balloons for your next celebration, they have a few tips for safe disposal:
"One, don’t let them go after you’re done with them. Deflate them. You can donate them to a school for an art project, you can use them as packing paper, you know, for a present or package that you're sending off, or you could even shred them into tinsel to put on your Christmas tree and just reuse them over and over and over," Ray suggested.
To cut down on balloon outages and fires, California recently passed Assembly Bill 847 which requires stores to transition to non-electrically conductive balloons before January 1, 2027.
