Bristol fireworks company makes recycling pledge

Alan Christie (centre) is the company director of Skyburst

An award-winning fireworks company says it is working to make the industry more sustainable.

Skyburst, based in Bedminster, Bristol, has been running for 40 years. They organise specialist displays from Land's End to the Shetland Islands.

Now the company is sending waste from imported fireworks back to be recycled.

Company director Alan Christie said: "It's quite a serious thing that the industry's decided to look into and improve."

Over the past decade, firework manufacturers from all over the world have incorporated a lot of plastic elements into their products.

Skyburst imports products from China, Spain and Italy.

But Mr Christie said: "All of the products we import from China are made from recycled cardboard and made in the old fashioned traditional way, instead of all the plastics."

Skyburst organises displays around the country

Spanish fireworks, which are typically more powerful, have to be contained in plastic, but Mr Christie said they send the used containers back to be washed, recycled and reused up to 15 or 20 times.

Clean-up teams return to the site of a display to pick up debris.

Mr Christie also said the organisers consider noise levels and the impact on animals when planning events, and notify locals of times and locations of firework displays.

He said: "It is a concern. But if you've got 12,000 people coming to a display from a local area, that's 12,000 people that aren't letting off fireworks in their garden throughout the whole evening.

"So the noise and disruption is focused to 15 minutes and then it stops and everyone goes home.

"I think that's a very good way of helping to protect animals and reduce noise impact on the area."

However, Professor Richard P Evershed, from the Organic Geochemistry Unit at the University of Bristol, said recycling would do little to help the real victims of fireworks - animals.

"My biggest concern about fireworks is the huge distress caused to animals, domestic and wild, in urban and rural locations," he said.

"And this distress is extreme - farmers, horse and pet owners, and wildlife organisations, all report their animals being highly distressed.

"Some so much so that many injure or even kill themselves. Given fireworks cause animal cruelty on a grand scale I would urge people to think long and hard about releasing their own firework or attending displays.

"In view of the above I feel the idea of re-cycling or sustainability in relation to fireworks is a complete irrelevance.

"It's a pathetic example of green-washing to make a costly, unsustainable and damaging activity somehow seem ecologically acceptable."