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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.........
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
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.
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?
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.