Tag: children’s
Strike staff offered to Great Ormond Street children’s hospital
Farmer and former children’s TV presenter given major roles in King’s coronation
‘Failure at every level’ led to children’s homes abuse, report says
The Dangerous World Of Kidfluencers: Do We Share Too Much Of Children’s Lives Online?
You may have heard of social media influencers, but an idea you may not be so familiar with is the…
The post The Dangerous World Of Kidfluencers: Do We Share Too Much Of Children’s Lives Online? appeared first on TechRound.
UK fines TikTok $15.8 million for GDPR violation of children’s privacy
TikTok fined £12.7m for misusing children’s data
‘Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey’ Turned a Children’s Icon Into a Murderer. Good
Stopping school inspections not in children’s best interests, says Ofsted
Why Some California Cities are Banning Children’s Balloons
There are several recent cases of sea turtles, seals and sea lions off the California coast discovered entangled in or choked by balloon strings, or in physical distress after ingesting balloons. Among the key findings of a 2020 Oceana report on ocean plastic was that balloons were one of the most common types of plastics entangling or consumed by marine life, along with bags, recreational fishing line, sheeting and food wrappers.
The threat to sea life is one of the main reasons a handful of coastal Southern California cities have slapped restrictions on the use of balloons, ranging from prohibiting the sale or release of lighter-than-air balloons (which generally means those filled with helium) to a ban on the sale, distribution or public use of all balloons passed by Laguna Beach on Tuesday.
If this trend sounds familiar, that’s because a few years back it was single-use plastic straws that were targeted by local bans. Eventually, there were so many different rules about distribution of plastic disposable straws that a statewide law, beginning in 2019, made sense. Balloons may be heading for the same fate….
California will phase out mylar balloons by 2031 because their metallic nylon foil shells have a tendency to cause blackouts and spark wildfires when they float into power lines. That’s good, but now California legislators should consider placing restrictions on the use and release of latex balloons. The balloon industry markets latex rubber balloons as biodegradable, but studies have found that they don’t break down in the ocean. Furthermore, the strings attached to balloons are generally plastic. This makes them single-use trash in the same way that grocery bags and straws are, and releasing them into the environment is littering.
A Laguna Beach environmentalist tells the Times people need to rethink the way they look at plastic. “When people say they throw things away — there’s really no away.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.