How will you be spending the holiday? Many people see fireworks from the same location every year. Others search the city for the best show.

LAist friend Marc J. Sahara of The Inconvenient Bag has a few thoughts to share with us about celebrating July 4th. He spends his days trying to convince people to use canvas bags, recycle, and think about the world around us. Does the holiday create too much environmental waste for us to feel right about enjoying the fireworks?

I did not want to write a typical Fourth of July environmental warning or threat.

In fact, I was going to talk about how fireworks cause air pollution. Heavy metals and salts cause the many colors include barium, aluminum, lead, mercury salts, antimony, magnesium, etc which pollute our air and our lungs. I was going to discuss about the waste created by fireworks, which end up in our landfills, gutters and hillsides. Approximately 1,000 tons of new waste is created by fireworks each Fourth.

Furthermore, I could have written about the manufacturing of fireworks, in which raw materials and energy are used to create the product. These materials need to be mined from our planet and processed with chemicals in factories that pollute, i.e., Made in China. Then the fireworks are transported place to place until they finally reach us.

I wanted to compare a firework explosion to the limited convenience a plastic bag brings. A firework lasts for a short period of time, a plastic bag is used for 10 minutes. After a few seconds, that firework has caused damage to our environment and then immediately turns into toxic waste. After a few minutes, a plastic bag is thrown out, and will now spend the next few thousand years in our ocean or landfill breaking down into poison and toxins.

Finally, other topics I considered included fire season, water pollution, noise, transportation, accidents stemming from the misuse of legal or illegal fireworks, etc., etc.

However, I know there are many articles, blogs, news reports and police warnings bombarding us from now until the Fourth.

Therefore, instead of being negative, a loser, I’d thought I’d take this opportunity to be positive, a winner.

I’m here to tell everyone that the Fourth of July is an Eco-American Holiday. In this year of our Presidential elections, we must remember that we are not Caucasian, African-American, Asian, Hispanic, etc. We are Eco-Americans, we are one culture, one people and we share one planet.

This is a wonderful time to be alive and to make the crucial eco-decisions that will shape the future of our nation and our planet. The time is now to unite and make a conscious choice to live sustainable.

As for me, I will be spending July 4-6 at Huntington Beach’s Parade & Celebration making new friends, creating environmental awareness and learning new tips, tricks and secrets from our Eco-American brothers and sisters on how to reduce our own carbon footprint. In my experience, a bond is formed when someone shares a new way to be eco-friendly that I did not know.

Did you know that recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a conventional TV for three hours? Or it saves a half gallon of gasoline (the price of gas is hurting all of our pocketbooks)!

Pretty cool, huh? We the People of Eco-America, now that’s pretty cool too. Eco-cool.

The Inconvenient Lifestyle – It’s Worth The Hassle!
Marc J. Sahara
President, The Inconvenient Bag

And check out: The Inconvenient Bag's 5 Tips for Being Green In LA