Photographer captures balloons 'after the party' to show impact to Ontario waterways

All of Yesterday's Parties is a project by London, Ont., photographer Justin Langille to highlight the gap between people's love for balloons and the risks they pose to the environment.

Langille photographed lost and discarded balloons in southwestern Ontario using a Polaroid camera. His work has earned him a Canada Council for the Arts grant to expand the project. 

Langille spoke with Afternoon Drive host Allison Devereaux. Here's part of their conversation

How did you become so interested in balloons?

I was an outreach worker with London Cares (an organization the provides street outreach). I started to spend a lot of time around the Thames River with people who lived there and had nowhere else to go. I just started to understand, through that experience and other things, the importance of water to people's lives. 

Then there were other visits to beaches, like the Pinery Provincial Park with my family, where my kids love to play on beaches. I started to notice the plastic pollution and that balloons were everywhere.

I would find them in all shapes and sizes: deflated, fresh from a party somewhere blown across the lake. I started to understand how ubiquitous they are and how much of a problem plastic pollution really is.

Tell us where that led you?

I really started to follow the trail of balloons and started to to look for them everywhere I went. As someone who feels responsible for water stewardship, I started to pick them up. I started to think about balloons more. Balloons are such a universal symbol of joy for kids and for everybody, almost, across the world.

But they're also extremely toxic and they can strangle wildlife. They can choke wildlife. 

You talk about the idea of balloons being tied to celebration. People love balloons and yet at the same time they're so harmful. What is your reflection on that?

It's humbling because they're embedded in so many parts of our lives, as well as the environment now. 

I think they really show us how deeply we have to change as a society and how profoundly we have to change these parts of our lives. I think it really forces us to consider, 'Do I need balloons at my children's party? Do I need balloons at this celebration? What could I do instead?'

When you are photographing balloons in the wild, in cities, what is the mood you're trying to get across?

I think in other venues, like at my children's school, there was someone who had a balloon to celebrate their child's first day of kindergarten. It was special, printed with their name and everything.

So, I'm trying to document how people are still actively using balloons. Not to draw attention to things that people are doing wrong, but just to show, how significant they are if we multiply the numbers. Then, how big of a problem they can be the next day, after the party. 

Is it just a lack of understanding of how harmful they are? Or do people just love balloons so much that it's hard to let go of?

I think it's a lack of public education. I think that more needs to be done, maybe a nuanced strategy by environmental groups. I think more intention by local governments to try to impress upon people's consciousness about how we're using products, how we're pursuing our lives with single use plastics. 

What do you say to people who say, "Well, it's just a balloon. What's the harm?"

I think that just comes back to the responsibility for the places where we exist; a recognition that we need these lands and waters to survive. And while it is just the one balloon, cumulatively, if you think about everything that everybody else does, your balloon is among the 700,000 or more that land on Great Lakes shores if it's released accidentally, or on purpose. 

Now that you have this grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, where are you going with this?

I'm going to start to explore the larger life cycle of the balloon. Primarily, where they're created and how they're being circulated in the economy.

If this changes how we use balloons, if their use changes as plastic laws, perhaps, become more restrictive - hopefully - in the next few years, we might be using balloons differently. I'm also seeing this as maybe an opportunity to still capture their social significance now, before we do start to change this measurably. 

Interesting. So you might be documenting the end of balloons.

Maybe. I have more research to do but I have identified some places where they're produced. That's a big goal for the project, to make some of those inroads on where they're coming from.