Slashdot Mirror
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."
What's the pollution/contamination potential for LED-equivalent screw-in bulbs? (Including at the manufacturing level)
He's the Junk Science guy, which means that you ought to take this entire article with a mountain of salt. Even with the mercury in the CFL, you're ahead of the game when you consider the energy savings. A lot of electricity is produced with coal, and that puts out more mercury than the CFL contains over the life of the bulb.
But there's a lesson here - if you break a CFL, open the windows and clean it up yourself. Don't lick the floor where it broke. Don't gnaw on the pieces of broken glass. Don't scrape the coating from the inside of the bulb, dissolve it in vodka, and inject it into your neck. Use common sense.
There's no need to call the government to help you clean up a broken lightbulb. This woman deserves what she gets, just for wasting people's time. The bureaucrats probably don't want to mess with her house either, but they are *doing what they are paid to do* and if they didn't take care of the reported problem, someone could accuse them of not doing their job.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I purposely went and bought the most expensive one[s] I could find to try to avoid any potential problems, perhaps I just got a bad brand / type.
The ones I have don't flicker, but have a 30-40 second warm up period, which would be fine if it was an office environment - but in a house - you generally stumble into a room, and flick on the light to avoid tripping over shit, but with the CFLs, you get to vaguely see what you just stubbed your toe on...
Have you ever heard the term "Mad as a Hatter"? Maybe, but you probably do know who the Mad Hatter is.
Mad as a Hatter is a term that stems from "Hatters" (hat makers) using Mercury in the formation of hats. It was used in the process of removing hair from animal hides. All the hatters ultimately went insane or had the other symptons of mercury poisioning.
That's where the term comes from, and that's where the idea for the "Mad Hatter" came from for Alice in Wonderland. What does this have to do with the article? Nothing really, just trying to spread some random information.
and includes comments from several officials, saying that this incident was nothing to get worked up about.o m_content&task=view&id=7446&Itemid=31
http://ellsworthmaine.com/site/index.php?option=c
And for those who are concerned about CFL mercury in the waste stream -- CFLs are nothing more than smaller versions of the fluorescent tubes we have been throwing in our landfills since the 50s. That's right, every industial building and school in the US uses them and has for the last 50 years. So, the problem isn't new. And the white powder isn't mercury...it's the phosphor. That's not to say that recycling them wouldn't be a really good idea. It's being done commercially, but not yet for consumers in most places.
Some have horrible colors and a relatively long (.5 to 1 second) warm up time
To be fair, some (like the one in my bathroom) have a 1/2 turn on time but then a very long (~1 minute) warm up time. It comes on bright enough (maybe like a 50W incandescent), but after being on for close to a minute it suddenly ramps over a few seconds up to probably 150% of its previous brightness, then stays there.
It's a little weird, but it's not too bad.
(These are made by GE, so they aren't Billy Bob's Light Warehouse brand. I'm sure there are better ones, but there are also a lot of worse ones.)
In contrast, the one I have in my living room lamp (Sylvania) is instant on.
The other thing I've done is in my kitchen and bedroom I have fixtures that have two bulbs. I have 1 CFL and 1 incandescent in each.
According to the article, after breaking the lightbulb in her daughter's bedroom, Mrs Bridges called Home Depot which directed her to Poison Control hotline which directed her to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, which sent a specialist.
r mometer
9 3_4175-11751--,00.html
l ls.pdf
s ustainability/archive_2006/reduction_in_mercury.ph p?main=global&parent=4390&id=gl_en_news&lang=en
The specialist found an unacceptable quantity of mercury (six times the "safe" level), and directed Mrs Bridges to a cleanup firm that gave the U$ 2.000 estimate (way high in my opinion, is it that hard to clean?).
Insurance, as usual, won't cover it (sounds reasonable this time).
An interesting point is that each CFL contains five milligrams of mercury, and Maine's "safety" standard is 300 nanograms per cubic meter.
By comparison, according to Wikipedia, "the typical "fever thermometer" contains between 0.5 to 3 g (.3 to 1.7 dr) of elemental mercury."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-in-glass_the
She could have saved some money by reading this:
"Cleaning Up Small Mercury Spills, For spills of less than two tablespoons:" by the government of Michigan
http://www.michigan.gov/deq/0,1607,7-135-3307_296
or this (PDF warning) http://www.newmoa.org/prevention/mercury/smallspi
Not every CFL has that much mercury:
http://www.lighting.philips.com/gl_en/news/press/
Still, it's good to be warned and be aware about the potential environmental hazard.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Certainly there are urban legends around which are propagated by conservative propaganda sites.
... with the low power consumption, you can use cheapest-available desk lamps to put the bulbs in, and place them wherever's convenient.
But that there are five milligrams of Hg in a compact-fluorescent lightbulb is not one of them; in particular, the link that you provided admits that.
I too have a house full of CFLs - people complaining that 60-watt-equivalent CFLs are too dim are taking slightly the wrong approach, CFLs are so much more efficient than incandescent lights that you can put, into a fitting that can only handle 60 watts of heat, a 23-watt CFL which is equivalent to a 150-watt incandescent. My study is lit with three 23-watt CFLs, which provides a really excellent reading light
Did you check out the "credentials" of the FA author and his friends? You'll find things like global warming doesn't exists, junk food is good for you, it's healthy to be fat and so on and so forth.
It's big busines' wet dream website.
Wonder whose paying him?
Need Mercedes parts ?
I don't know if it was just me, but if you guys remember that scene in The 40-year-Old Virgin where they're breaking fluorescent tubes against each other's legs, then shouldn't all the actors in that scene be dead with how much mercury was floating around there?
without anything solid to back this up, I will give you the expanation that I have received for this exact question.
The amount of mercury in the compact flourescent bulb is less than the amount of mercury used in the creation and powering of incandescent bulbs over their lifetime. There is a potential hidden advantage to the compact bulb in that the mercury is contained, which is less harmful than the mercury spewed into the air by the power plant that powered the older bulb.
Less than perfect, but a good start and better than doing nothing.
We looked at buying some CFL bulbs the other day. My wife is a little paranoid about some things, including mercury, so she isn't too sure about using the CFL's. But I thought it's interesting how on the boxes they say that they contain mercury, and to dispose of them properly. How do you dispose of mercury properly? I once had a mercury thermometer that broke open and made a mess, so I called around to a few places, not wanting to just drop it in the trash. No one could tell me how to dispose of it. The best answer I got was to take it to my local waste transfer station where I left a bag of contaminated items, including carpet, with a pile of what looked like chemical cleaners and stuff. I think I even had to pay a small fee.
A few months later, my kids fried our microwave oven. Again, I tried to find out what the best way to dispose of a microwave is. Noone would give me a straight answer. I don't even know what exactly is in a microwave, but I'm sure there's some stuff that shouldn't be in the groundwater supply. I ended up tossing it in a dumpster, because I couldn't get any answers.
I think it's great that Wal-mart and others are pushing CFL's, but I wish there was more information available about how to get rid of old bulbs like this. And batteries. Global Warming is important, but I think that slowly poisoning our soil and water isn't a good thing, either. But the manufacturers wash their hands of it all by saying "Dispose of Properly". So how do I dispose of it?
Steven Milloy is hardly one who should be taken seriously on environmental / health issues. Read more about the offer of the article by visiting wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_MilloyEnergystar.gov has a PDF file up about CFLs and describes that the broken glass is more dangerous to you than the mercury and provides the following disposal advice:
http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/promotions/--------- If its possible it will happen, If its impossible it will just take longer
Easy to say when you can't see this massive coal power plant from your house.
Well, technically I can't see it from my house, just the massive plumes of crap it puts out.
If you follow the train tracks in the satellite image you can see a train pulling away from the literal mountain 'o coal...Those trains come by every day. Care to speculate on how many lightbulbs worth of mercury is in one of those 100+ car trains?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.