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Mercury Contamination Vs. Energy-Efficient Lightbulbs
phyrebyrd writes "How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent lightbulb? About US$4.28 for the bulb and labor — unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about US$2,004.28, which doesn't include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health."
..find these energy efficent bulbs really irritating?
I'm all for saving the environment, but I hate the fact the bulbs have a 'warm up' period, and whatever 'colour' bulb I get, it still throws a nasty fluro hue.
Is that just me?
Once again we see that every environmental action involves a trade-off of some kind. Sometimes it means loss of job (as in the timber industry), sometimes it means annoyance and inconvenience (as with "low flow" toilets and showerheads), etc. But there is ALWAYS a trade-off. Contrary to what some environmentalists would have us believe, there is always a price to be paid for the "Green" life. And sometimes the price is ultimately more damaging to society and the environment than its worth.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If you buy the cheap ones at department stores, you will be disappointed. Go to a lighting specialist and pay a bit more.
I find this scare-mongering over mercury to be amusing. Have you ever broken an old-school tube flouro? You know, the ones with 10 to 100 times the mercury of modern Compact Flouro bulbs? Yeah.
Blar.
Last year, a local middle school was locked down and a hazmat team was called in. The kids were kept locked inside for several hours after the normal release time, cause someone had inadvertently dropped and broken a mercury thermometer OUTSIDE the school.
Times have changed, I remember rolling around blobs of mercury on lab tables in school.
[Insert pithy quote here]
will Walmart, Homedepot, etc be offering s drop off for old burned out CFLs(yes they do burn out too) like autozone does for old oil and batteries?
The author of TFA is Steven Milloy, who publishes JunkScience.com. It is devoted to "debunking the global warming myth", telling the truth about virtues of dioxin and to other similar issues.
The site is an obvious propaganda mouthpiece.
The National Post isn't as ardently neo-con as it used to be, since the backlash against conservatism made it wholly unprofitable to be so -- but it's still known to be far from objective.
If anything, the National Post leans libertarian conservative, so anything they can print to discredit goverment "interference" and the environmental movement, such as this FUD article about the potential financial nightmare of breaking a CFB, is on board with their philosophy.
What bothers me is that the less sceptical people who read the article will simply discredit environmentally sound policies even more than they do already.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Like most people, when something no longer works, it goes in the trash. After the CFL's start making inroads into most houses...will we soon then be forced to take our bulbs to a special disposal unit or be taxed to cover the cost of disposal of these?
Most people do not recycle, do not haul stuff to be disposed of in an orderly, environmentally sensitive way. They throw it in the trash, and the trash man hauls it off to 'somewhere'. Will the mercury in these bulbs make that even worse than it is today?
I'm not really gonna want to buy and use something unless it is economically beneficial to me, or makes life easier.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
As the Wikipedia page notes, this calculation changes because of two trends. Better environmental controls on coal plants make the mercury used in CFLs worse, while greater adoption of recycling makes CFLs better.
Aside from concerns about aesthetics (I don't like incandescent lighting much, but YMMV), this is really one of the last complaints about CFLs. The article was a poorly researched rant about how environmentalists are hypocrites and things which seem "green" really aren't. Sometimes that's true, but with CFLs, it's almost a no-brainer.
Take, for example, the EPA's factsheet on CFLs. It suggests that this person mentioned in TFA overreacted to the light bulb break. The instructions for cleanup are:
We're talking about 4mg of mercury here, compared with 500mg in a thermometer.
Basically, CFLs should be recycled to reap all of the environmental benefits. If you buy replacements for burned out bulbs (a rare event), just store the old bulb in the new packaging (they tend to be resealable). Wait until you have a number of them to recycle, and then do it. This isn't the first consumer item we should be treating like this: rechargeable batteries (especially lithium-ion) should be recycled as well. I have several dead laptop batteries which await eventual recycling. For that matter, items like CRT monitors have lead in them, and should also be recycled properly.
So the article is just FUD about what should be an easy choice for anyone who doesn't mind the aesthetics of CFLs.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Suddenly, it made sense why CFLs were equated with thermometers (which contain over 100 times the mercury, and for which safer, equivalent replacements exist), why the environmental impact of the mercury was not weighed against the impact of the energy gains, why the author would question why we want mercury in our bulbs but not in our fish, or why environmentalist was used as a pejorative.
Remember, if you're reading something that sounds mildly absurd, the author might have an agenda. That doesn't mean that he can't make valid points, but it helps you to know how much skepticism to have.
I just want to know why they come in nonrecyclable plastic blister packs. Everything comes in these now and almost none of them are marked for recycling, so they must be discarded as trash. Probably this is because a lot of them are made of nonrecylable products, but if shopping at the supermarket has taught me anything it's that there's a broad assortment of recyclable plastics. You can make plastics out of (IIRC) one of four major families and they can be recycled almost anywhere.
Why are we not requiring that all those products be packed recyclably? If I get something in a cardboard box with styrofoam I can recycle everything but the baggies. If I get something in one of those blister packs, well, that's a lot of needless waste. For large products that crap gets pretty heavy (thick) and large.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You're kidding, right? Do you individually drive dead batteries down to the proper disposal facility when you replace them, too? This may sound a bit goofy (work with me here) but you understand that you do have the option of storing burnt-out CFLs yourself until you have enough to warrant a trip down to a recycling facility? I've got a paper grocery sack sitting on a shelf in my garage. When I replaced the bulbs in my house, I put the original CFL packaging in the sack. When they burn out (none have burnt out yet, after 1.5 years or so), I'll just replace them and store them in the sack. You're complaining about a trip that you should only have to make once every three years or so.
I'm all for a rational debate about the merits and demerits of CFLs, but sometimes it seems like people are just looking for excuses to complain about them -- hence all the "OMG MERCURY" and "disposal hassle" silliness.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
...of CFLs being a dangerous source of mercury. The fact is, that old style tubes in landfills comprise more
'dangerous mercury' than every CFL ever created.
Mercury is bad yes, but this is a non-issue...there was no out-cry over the tube flouros. There were no discernable effects from the much higher rates of mercury in those tubes, why should there be from the CFLs? It smells to me like this is the work of an anti-earthist who wants to save a few nickles.
Blar.
The National Incandescent Light Board - Helping to keep America in the dark since the invention of the light bulb.
Of course, it goes without saying that ALL flourescent lights contain mercury.
Bad Flourescent lights! Bad! Bad!
It also goes without saying that burning fosil fuels, especially coal, realease mercury into the atmosphere, and the more energy a light bulb uses, the more mercury it releases.
Bad incandescent lights! Bad! Bad!
Welcome to the conundrum of modern technology.
"We've got like two types of pollution, bad and worse. Which one you want?"
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
I like compact fluorescents, but I do notice their color, flicker, and startup time, even on the expensive ones. (Often, the flicker and startup time is great at first, but gets worse over time.) I use CFs in ceiling fixtures which usually have 2 bulbs inside: I put one incandescent and one fluorescent in each. I save half the power, and the incandescent fills in the flicker and startup time very nicely. Plus, having one wasteful incandescent in there encourages me to turn the lights off when I'm not using them.
I can't really understand why, perhaps a knee-jerk reaction against the self-righteous tone environmentalists usually assume, but the article seems to be written more as an argument against using CFL rather than a simple report on the compromise. It takes an easy and fitting swipe at the idea of banning incandescents as a start, but after flirting with the idea that it might be an economic conspiracy perpetrated by Walmart and Home Depot, the second half of the article is basically a rant about the fact that CFL's are highly recommended, despite their mercury, by the same people who fret about mercury contamination from other sources.
Now as many slashdotters know, because this has been discussed multiple times before, this journalist doesn't know what he's talking about with respect to the latter two points (I agree with him on the foolishness of legally banning incandescents). Although CFL's cost on around 3-5 times as much as incandescents, they're also rated to last 5 times as long (although noisy power or heat can reduce that), meaning Walmart sells the same gross value and the user invests the same amount over long time periods...not counting the reduced power bill.
And flat out contrary to his contention that environmentalists ignore the mercury content in CFL's, the EPA did a study examining the amount of mercury contained in CFL's versus that contained in fossil fuels. They found that the adoption of CFL's reduced the net mercury released into the environment because of the power saved, which means less coal burned, taking into account the fraction of power that comes from coal. Furthermore, this study did not take into controlled bulb disposal, which is mandated in some US states for large volume users of fluorescents and further reduces the release of mercury.
The two valid subpoints he has are first that the bulbs are a point-source of mercury. I mentioned proper disposal above, but contamination in the case of breakage is a compromise that's been with us as long as fluorescents have, even longer actually with mercury thermometers. The second is that they are manufactured mostly in India and China, which are beyond our environmental controls. Of course, that assumes the plants over there are releasing harmful amounts of mercury into the environment, is irrelevant to his financial argument of cleanup costs to the US economy, and is largely irrelevant to the general case for using CFL's, assuming the mercury can be acceptably controlled at both manufacture and disposal.
With the author apparently either ignorant or picking and choosing facts to present at will, it seems his position as publisher of junkscience.com is quite ironic. He's certainly not helping readers make an informed decision in this case.
Yeah, I noticed the same thing. He's writing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is the same outfit that recently made those TV commercials saying global warming is fake. Check out CEI here:
s e_Institute
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_Enterpri
Mr. Spleen
An incandescant bulb running off a coal fired power plant will release more mercury into the evironment than a landfilled CF bulb. Eating tuna every day for a year will cause you to ingest more mercury than eating one CF bulb each year.
Environmentalism has to be about tradeoffs. Nobody claims that a biodiesel car doesn't cause pollution, or that a hybrid isn't contributing to global warming. The point is that they cause less damage.
CF bulbs cause less CO2 and less mercury to enter the environment than regular bulbs (at least as long as we're using coal power). It can be very slightly dangerous if you break one in your house, but it's still less dangerous than breaking a regular fluorescant tube in your house.
This article is scaremongering at its worst because he expresses the risk in scientific terms instead of relating it to things that laypersons can understand.
The issue is when you take 5mg of mercury and multiply it by the number of people who just toss these in landfills. Let us take a reasonably small number of say 40,000 bulbs in your local landfill that is 200,000 mg of mercury. I can assure you that 200,000 mg could easily leach into your local water supply if the land fill is poorly designed or overused (which happens frequently).
Ah but burning coal, which many powerplants burn to produce energy, releases mercury too. By using CFLs people don't use as much power and therfore not as much coal is burned. Niether this article nor you mention this. If it's just concern for mercury then a comparison of how much mercury is released by burning coal for the power to light incandescents and CFLs vr how much mercury is in CFLs needs to be done. However it's not so simple because by using CFLs greenhouse gas emissions are also cut, then there the pollution from coal mining.
I bet an overall analysis, ROI or TCO, of incandsescent lights and CFLs will conclude CFLs are better. Oh, also you mention about CFLs ending up in landfills however some places take them for recycling. I can't vouch for it but here's a business that recycles and makes equipment to recycle CFLs, Air Cycle.
FalconShould there be a Law?
That is about 1.2% as much as the 5 milligrams of mercury in a typical CF bulb -- nowhere close to 50%
While the OP is clearly wrong about the numbers, there is still a valid point to be made here: environmental mercury levels are a result of many factors. Others have pointed out that the EPA has argued that the mercury reduction from less coal burned will more than make up for the mercury in CFLs. This is a bit of lame argument to me because I have no coal plants in my house, but quite a few CFLs, so in terms of risk to my kids the smaller amount in the CFLs poses a bigger risk.
But by the same token, the mercury we EAT seems to me to be a more significant risk than the mercury that might escape from a broken CFL. If I drop a single CFL every five years and somehow managed to ingest 75% of the mercury released thereby, I would be getting about as much mercury as if I ate one 170 g can of tuna (at 0.353 ppm) once a month.
Obviously if I'm clumsy I could put myself at greater risk, although really, I find it hard to imagine how I would ingest 75% of the released mercury.
And finally, one thing about the "this is an outrage" nonsense in the silly story: did the guy have the mercury levels in the OTHER rooms in his house tested? At the ng/m**3 level it is perfectly possible that there were other sources of environmental contamination that had nothing to do with CFLs. Without some kind of control or background measurement the whole thing is just hot air.
And really finally, where were all these staunch anti-mercury advocates when we all used mercury thermometers?
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
1.2% versus 50% is a pretty big difference (41.7x), but not compared to the rate at which a person may safely eat tuna versus the rate at which people actually eat compact fluorescent light bulbs.
What you're telling us is that eating one CFL is roughly as dangerous as eating one can of albacore tuna per week for a year.
His numbers may be wrong, but his basic point still stands, especially with regards to internal vs. external exposure (even most crazy people don't eat lightbulbs).
Which also suggests the family discussed in the article got taken by the mercury specialist.
200,000 mg = 200 grams, the weight of just more than half a can of soda pop. Mercury is 13.54 times denser than water. 200g/13.54 = 14.77 centiliters of mercury, about half a liquid ounce in total volume. In the grand scheme of tens of thousands of gallons of captured liquid runoff in a typical landfill, that's literally a drop in the bucket, and a tiny one at that. And this mercury has to become methylated to become bioavailable. It is likely that some of this will go through this process. And it's likely some will not.
And if your landfill has problems containing their liquids, whose bacterial content alone is far, far more potentially devastating than your potential mercury problem, your local environmental protection agency will shut them down until it's addressed. Fines are steep for this sort of mismanagement.
Is this mercury a problem? Maybe. But let's not let big, scary numbers like "200,000" incite fear where there should be none. And let's not "point source" this problem either. Do you have any idea of how much less coal is likely to be burned using these bulbs? I'd say that the mercury emissions from the coal burned to provide electricity for an equivalent amount of light from older incandescent light bulbs eclipse the mercury that could potentially escape from these bulbs. It's got to be a fair amount of the 48 tons or so that the USEPA claims coal fired plants in the US alone emit each year.
This is yet another case of TANSTAAFL - "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch".
That article is much better about balance. What's really happening is that Bridges is insisting on making a big deal out of this in spite of officials telling her it's just find to clean it up herself and throw it away like a sensible person would.
The root of her concern is that she doesn't really understand the rationale behind the state's 300ng/cubic meter.That level is for chronic environmental exposure in the air that you're actually breathing. Even ignoring all advice given and just cleaning it up like she would an incandescent bulb would present no problem. It might spike the exposure at breathing level above 300 but it wouldn't stay there for long (certainly not long enough to be considered chronic exposure). Paper towels or tissues would have been good enough. Optionally, she could then sprinkle some powdered sulpher on the area and then clean that up normally.
The real moral here is that crazy over-reacting can make anything expensive and traumatic and there are always companies willing to accept your money if you do insist on over-reacting. File this one along with people who insist on an MRI, x-ray, eeg and seeing the chief of neurology every time their toddler bumps his head on the coffee table in spite of assurances that it's just a little bump.
Steven J. Milloy is NOT a scientist but industry-paid hack, is a columnist for Fox News and a paid advocate for Phillip Morris, ExxonMobil and other corporations. For years, Milloy has been scamming people on Fox News and on his junkscience site.
This guy has been bought and paid for many times over by companies like Phillip Morris and Exxon Mobil.
This report from the Union of Concerned Scientists documents how Milloy, headed a nonprofit organization called the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, which had been covertly created by the tobacco company Philip Morris in 1993 to manufacture uncertainty about the health hazards posed by secondhand smoke. Milloy also served as a member of the small 1998 Global Climate Science Team task force that mapped out ExxonMobil's disinformation strategy on global warming. Between 2000 and 2004, ExxonMobil gave $50,000 to Milloy's Advancement of Sound Science Center, and another $60,000 to an organization called the Free Enterprise Education Institute (a.k.a. Free Enterprise Action Institute), which is also registered to Milloy's home address.
ExxonMobil also gave $130,000 to Milloy's "Free Enterprise Action Institute" between 1998-2005. The organization is registered under Milloy's name and home address.
Milloy is also the former director of the "National Environmental Policy Institute". Yet another industry front group providing disinformation on climate science to which ExxonMobil gave at least $75,000.
As others have stated, Milloy never mentions the large amounts of mercury being released from coal-fired power plants that has resulted in levels of mercury so high in lakes and streams of New England that state health agencies have to warn pregnant women and young children not to eat too much fish caught from these waters. Milloy never mentions that his friends in the power industry (and unfortunately the current administrators in the EPA) fought tooth and nail to prevent the installation of equipment on the power plants to remove the large amounts of mercury released to the air.
As has been pointed out, the mercury in the CFL bulbs (unlike that being released from power plants) is contained and the bulbs can be recycled. Should we eventually move to other solutions with less potential for mercury contamination like LED bulbs. Absolutely! But LED bulbs are even more expensive now than CFLs.
What people like Milloy do and have done for years is nothing less then criminal: Take money from industry to lie and confuse Americans about the dangers of smoking, concerns about global warming, and other health, safety, and consumer issues.