With summer coming on, and lots of outdoor evening activities to attend, it feels like a good time to consider the old standby of glow sticks. They are widely used, mostly single-use plastic, mildly toxic, non-recyclable and very difficult to trash safely due to their questionable chemical content.
I went to Amazon and found more than 20,000 items listed under the glow stick heading. They come in about every conceivable size, shape, and color, so they need a closer look.
Some glow sticks are labeled non-toxic, but the Federal Trade Commission and our friends at Earth911 note that there is no formal definition of the term. In this case, they often use a chemical called “dibutyl phthalate” (or just DBP, because so few of us can pronounce the real name) which is banned in Europe from use in cosmetics and is suspected of having some negative effects on reproductive health in humans. One company does claim their product is now phthalate-free, but others make no such claim.
The website for the Poison Control Center in North Carolina makes the interesting note that the liquid in the sticks is “low in toxicity but can cause irritation to any part of the body that it comes in contact with, including the eyes, skin and mouth.” They also say “Don’t be alarmed if lips and tongue glow for a few minutes” if the stuff is ingested. That puts a new twist on being “lit,” but I have no information on how it’s affected by beer.
So, assuming we can keep our kids, pets and possibly adult relatives from eating the things, they are still single-use products and we need to dispose of them when the glow goes away. They cannot be recycled, so they have to be trashed. The danger is that the chemicals will eventually leak out. Earth911 actually recommends turning them into a Household Hazardous Waste collection site, but our Public Works folks do not believe the people who do our HHW will take them.
The best choice here is to just not use these things.
If you want to do it anyway, a good alternative is LED glow sticks. Amazon lists only about 10,000 varieties of those, but all use batteries, rather than chemicals. One big issue here is that the batteries, whether the small button batteries or somewhat larger, rechargeable batteries, must be handled properly after they have failed. On the plus side, even the button batteries can, in some cases, offer up to as much as 200 hours of light that can be turned on and off, so the device can be used several times on a single battery. Devices using rechargeable batteries can extend that time even more.
LED sticks have an added advantage of being able to display several different light colors at the same time, in different parts of the device, or they can flash the light in various patterns, rather than just glow in one color until the chemical reaction is done.
Although they are mostly used for smaller devices like keychains and luggage tags, at least one company (UVPaqlite) makes a device that runs on photoluminescence. That’s the trick that lets the stars we sometimes glue to our kids’ bedroom ceilings glow in the dark for a few hours every night. These glow sticks use the same principle and can be recharged indefinitely, since they recharge from light absorbed during the day. They come only in a sort of soft green color, like the decals, but are less costly than chemical devices and last a very long time.
We can each decide whether having chemicals around that can make our kids’ tongues and lips glow is a good idea, but we can still enjoy the fun of glow sticks without endangering ourselves if we think the problem through carefully, and also accept that they will eventually become trash, whichever kind we choose. None will last indefinitely.
The Recycle Bin is a weekly column on what to recycle, what not to recycle, and why, in Brunswick. The public is encouraged to submit questions by email to brunsrecycleinfo@gmail.com. Harry Hopcroft is a member of the Brunswick Recycling and Sustainability Committee. This column is a product of his own research.
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