My View: Time to burst the balloon of the new airborne litter louts

A helium-filled balloon has become trapped by its string in one of the trees in our garden. With binoculars, I can make out pink hearts on the shiny silver surface, and the words "Happy Birthday". A curse upon the litter lout who let the gaudy thing fly free without thinking about where it would land or who would remove the deflated corpse. A curse upon the shop that sold the monstrosity.
By The Newsroom
Published 27th Oct 2010, 11:09 BST
Updated 27th Oct 2010, 11:10 BST

It has become a craze to order a birthday bouquet of different coloured balloons to celebrate a special anniversary. Cheerful, harmless fun – until someone tires of the display and releases the lot into the wild.

Our balloon is lodged too high to reach, even with a ladder. My initial reaction was to find a neighbour's child possessed of both a catapult and a cricketer's eye, until common sense told me that would get us both into trouble, not to mention the danger of broken windows. So I have to wait for the next high wind to

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rip its tether and take it away, when it will become someone else's problem.

Escaped balloons are not just an eyesore. Traditional rubber balloons filled by human puff pose less of a problem, since they gradually shrink, and latex is biodegradable. Helium, the same element that lifts mighty airships and transports adventurers in deckchairs over the Channel, also carries jolly party balloons far and wide. If they encounter a power cable on the way, they can short the cable and cause a blackout. Helium balloons either float higher and higher until they explode or the helium leaks out and they drift back to earth.

If the remains fall into a garden, or a city street, someone will have to sweep it up. If they fall in a forest or field, the foil will never degrade but simply tear itself into smaller and smaller tatters.

Worst of all, when balloons land in the sea, fish, dolphins and birds think the shiny remnants are food, with catastrophic results.

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And while I'm being a party pooper, what about Chinese lanterns? I once saw these released, and found flickering lights floating up into the sky a serene, beautiful sight. That was before I knew about the harm they do to livestock. Release a flotilla of pretty lanterns at your wedding, and you might as well go for a country walk sprinkling handfuls of razor wire in your wake. Paper and bamboo burn, but the spindly wire cradle will land 10, 20 or 30 miles away. Sharp scraps of wire are not just unsightly rubbish; hidden in a field they cause injury or death because grass-eating animals have few brains, and will swallow anything.

Dropping litter at ground level is becoming a thing of the past, as people begin to understand that we all share one planet. Is it too much to hope that air-borne litter will also become taboo?