No More Eco-Guilt on July 4th- Chemists Developing Green Fireworks

This is spectacular news- scientists are developing green fireworks. I love a big night of fireworks as much as the next guy, but the fact that the smoke produced by the show was chock full of toxic chemicals and gases always bothered me. Conventional fireworks leave behind a cloud of lead, barium, chromium, chlorates, dioxins, CO2, nitrogen, sulphur oxides, as well as smoke and particular matter.

Inventors Spot has it:

Conventional fireworks draw their energy from the oxidation of carbon. Clean fireworks, on the other hand, would get energy from the high temperatures that occur with the formation of nitrogen-rich compounds. Some possible compounds could be tetrazoles and tetrazines, which are made of four nitrogen atoms and either one or two carbon atoms, respectively.

To produce different colors, chemists could use aminotetrazole salts with specific non-toxic metals. For example, lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium and cesium result in red, orange, violet, purple, and pink flames, respectively.

Somewhat ironically, the most difficult color to produce with “green” fireworks is green. The researchers are looking into green-burning salts based on copper compounds.

Link [Inventor"s Spot]

Photo credit: Flickr user Michelle Jones UK