Glow sticks go bad?

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This weekend is “Preparedness Weekend” at the Priestly Place. Thanks in large part to the influence of the fine folks on these forums, I’m going through my emergency supplies and rethinking everything.

A couple of years ago the gf and me bought two emergency kits from the American Red Cross. The kits contain twelve bricks of compressed “food”, eight four-ounce packets of potable water, a flashlight, some basic cut-and-bump first aid, a few other odds and ends, and two twelve-hour glow sticks.

Looking the glow sticks over, I noticed they carry an expiration date of 2004. Curious to find whether the chems inside sticks somehow degrade, I searched and hit upon Ritter’s ETS site and <a href=”http://www.equipped.org/signal.htm”>this statement</a>:

“Note that all these chemical lights have a limited storage life. Expiration dates are marked on their packaging. Their performance goes quickly downhill after passing the expiration date.”

I snapped one. I wrote the time down on it, carried it around for a while and then set it aside in an unused room. Twelve hours later, it’s just reaching the end of its useful life. It was at least two years out of date yet it worked fine.

So now I’m wondering if the expiration dates on these things are for true.

Has anyone ever run into a glow stick that was too elderly to glow? What about the food bricks? They’re out of date by roughly two years but the package shows a manufacture date of 2000 and an expiry of 2005. I bet they don’t taste all that great to begin with but they’re vac sealed. Do they go “bad”? The antibiotic ointment in the first-aid kit is out of date too.

Thoughts? Experiences?

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