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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?
What's the pollution/contamination potential for LED-equivalent screw-in bulbs? (Including at the manufacturing level)
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.
This is an urban legend propagated by conservative propaganda sites. Good thing we have editors to filter this stuff out for us...
c hange_light/downloads/Fact_Sheet_Mercury.pdf
There is very little mercury in CFLs, you are in more danger of getting cut by the glass than you are of getting mercury poisoning.
http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/promotions/
I switched my house to CFLs and started saving $15-20 per month. If everyone did this then the big power companies would see a dent in their bottom line and so they start spreading lies like this.
We have the best government that money can buy.
No it isn't just you. About 50 people say this whenever the words "compact" "florescent" or "lightbulb" come up in an article. And the answer is spend more money. Yes, that's right... the cheapest possible bulbs kinda suck, big surprise. Some brands of compact florescent lightbulbs have no warm up period and give off perfectly balanced light in the visible spectrum and don't flicker at a visible frequency. Other brands take an hour to warm up, have green light, and flicker at 50Hz.
The challenge is finding the cheapest one that you can't tell from a "normal" bulb. Once you do... well then you RTFA for more worries, it seems.
also, the FDA says a pregnant woman is safe eating two cans of tuna every week without harming her baby, or taking hits off one broken CF bulb per week.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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]
6x higher than very low state standards?
Just take a fan and blow out the room for a couple of days.
Test your net with Netalyzr
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!
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 High Quality CFL's produced today have amalgam filling that prevents this. Also studies have found that a standard Incandescent bulb puts 10 times as much mercury into the environment because of coal power consumption.
The permitted mercury content of tuna in Canada is 0.5 part per million, so a 170-gram tin contains at most 85 micrograms of the stuff, about a factor sixty less than the lightbulb.
I think this is more a story about how good we are at detecting minuscule quantities of material, and how political requirements tend to be of the form that the allowable amount of a dangerous material should be a small multiple of the detection limit; I would wager that the health damage caused by the stress of being told to find two thousand dollars to decontaminate your living room is significantly greater than any that could possibly be caused by five milligrams of mercury vapour.
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.
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.
So you put down a drop cloth every time you replace a light bulb?
Are you the most boring person on earth, or what?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
From http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Steve_M illoy
Steven J. Milloy is a columnist for Fox News and a paid advocate for Phillip Morris, ExxonMobil and other corporations. From the 1990s until the end of 2005, he was an adjunct scholar at the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute.
One large grain of salt coming right up
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.
In a 'feel good' move, the premier of Ontario decided that his party will ban incandescent light bulbs by 2012. I am going to make me a business selling those in Ontario on the black market. CFLs can go screw themselves, I am not gonna use them.
You can't handle the truth.
Despite the moderators who think that this is informative, it's false. According to http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~frf/sea-mehg.html, canned albacore tuna has a mercury concentration of about 0.353 ppm. The "canned, light" tuna is listed as being about a third of that, but I'll go with the higher number to give you the benefit of the doubt. Working it out, that means that 170 grams of canned tuna has about 60 micrograms of mercury. That is about 1.2% as much as the 5 milligrams of mercury in a typical CF bulb -- nowhere close to 50%
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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.
I went to an art-show/Earth Day event a couple blocks from my house Saturday (yes, our town has it a week late). They had representatives of various environmental and recycling organizations.
The sign-in sheet had a place to check a box "pledging" to convert one incandescent lamp to flourescent. So I asked about where to return them when they die. After all, safe and convenient disposal is a critical component of encouraging their use.
Man, you would have thought I was watching roaches scurry when the light came on.
Dump them in the trash? No! - that's illegal dumping of toxic waste.
Save them and take them to the thrice-yearly e-waste event? No! - they are specifically prohibited.
Take them to the recycling center a couple blocks from my house? No! - "We're supposed to be self-supporting and the permit cost would bankrupt us."
Pretty much the only option provided was to wait for the "convenient" once-a-month Saturday the waste facility is open, put the burned-out bulb in my car, drive a half-dozen miles to the waste facility (they were helpful in telling me how to get to the facility while dodging the most dangerous parts of Richmond), wait in line (start/stop engine repeatedly or idle constantly), fill out paperwork, hand them the bulb, drive a half-dozen miles back home.
If that's the best the powers-that-be can come up with, they shouldn't be surprised that CFL adoption is less than they hoped. With cans, bottles and electronics they tack on a recycling fee up-front. And any store that sells ni-cads is required to accept them for recycling. Seems like a couple ideas that should be considered for flourescents.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
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
Several people have mentioned getting "better" CFLs, for those of us who have had crappy experiences with the bulbs. Nobody has mentioned brands or models. My question, then, is for those of you who say we need to try the "better" bulbs, what are you talking about, exactly? "Better" doesn't tell me what I should be looking for.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
The problem is that the fluorescent bulbs have only so many power-on/off cycles in them. they last much longer if you don't turn them on/off all the time and just leave them on constantly. However, in a home environment that is less likely. Especially since people have been trained to shut off lights when leaving rooms to save electricity.
I really don't have a good solution to this problem. I don't know if there is, maybe automatic controls of the lights that don't turn off so much?
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 ?
A quick search on this shows a lot of polarized information.. Depending on the writer's bias, CFLs are either evil and nasty or the savior of humanity. It's like getting news from Ann Coulter and Michael Moore.
The pro-CFLs say more mercury will be released by powering an incandescent bulb. But, not all power is from Coal plants, and what about the so-called "Clean Coal", which presumably reduces the amount of mercury pollution?
How does the 4-5mg of Mercury compare to other household or common industrial sources?
How about comparisons with recent improvements in incandescents, or improvements in LED lighting?
I already use CFLs. But, when I first bought them I wasn't aware of the possible hazards. I don't know what local options I have for disposal.
Maybe there needs to be a combo bulb/fixture that uses LEDs to fill in during the warm up of the compact fluorescent?
So you are saying it is not safe to eat the CF bulbs?
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
I think you are 100 percent correct. "Well isn't any amount too much?" No, really 100 watchits is really pretty safe. "But wouldn't it be safer if we required 10 or less?" Well, theoretically, but statistically "10 it is!".
They recently doubled the amount of radon detected indoors is deemed to be safe. Unless you're getting a safety inspection for a house sale, you won't hear much about this, however.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
She might be a nut. Apparently "She has talked with representatives from the CDC and DEP and spent roughly two to three hours a day over the past several weeks, talking on the phone and in person and contacting local papers to get the word out on what she believes are dangerous light bulbs." She was told they weren't a problem: "Officials have said that Bridges has little to worry about and she could easily clean up the bulbs by hand. State Toxicologist Andrew Smith said it would be unlikely that a person could contract mercury poisoning from the levels of mercury found in Bridges' daughter's room." The Ellsworth American article: http://ellsworthmaine.com/site/index.php?option=co m_content&task=view&id=7446&%20Itemid=31/
Maybe a little common sense is in order here?
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.
But the person with the 20 bedroom house with lights on in all of them to impress the neighbors will still needlessly be using many times the amount of power as the one person with one or two incandescents turned on in their one-bedroom house, and THAT is the problem that needs to be addressed.
Eat the rich?
I drank what? -- Socrates
I've read and seen a bunch of calculations.
What I've understood on it is this: The LED's will go about double, maybe triple the lifetime of a CFL. If you get the cheap ones, they will burn out (not enough heat dissipation, too much overdriving). The light will look better sometimes (the reproduced spectrum is smaller though) although for coloring you can't just use a filter, you'll have to get that color of LED (and white/blue/orange are more expensive as is and have less light-upbringing than standard). There is also the issue of controlling them, especially if you combine colors, the current for the different ones do differ. They have about the same power usage for the amount of light put out by a similar CFL (although better ones are being researched) and the angle of the light is usually smaller (again, depending on the product your results might differ). They might be just as heavy on the environment during production (the silicon and other products need refined highly and a bunch of plastic for the lens), disposal however (depending on your stand on the whole mercury debate) might be a little better for the environment than the CFL.
I have gotten the advice over again to use LED's as accent and mood lighting while using CFL's, plain FL's or high-efficient halogen if you want/need a lot of 'natural' light
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I guess I'm the same way. One of my inconsistencies is that I enjoy a refreshing rain shower, I like to see the plants turn green and flowers bloom. But I get all upset at flooding. I'm just weird. I like water, so more water is better, right? If more is better, too much is just right.
Turns out I've got weird inconsistencies with other stuff too. Like vitamins and minerals in food. I want to get about 5-10 micrograms of Vitamin D per day. And yet I get all pissy when someone tries to increase the dose to 1 mg/day. What the hell is wrong with me? Do I want rickets or something?
I am not a crackpot.
It is inevitable, LEDs are efficient, are not fragile, and can last several decades.
High output LED manufactures such as Phillips/Lumileds who makes Luxeon stars and emitters, are going to thrive in the next 10 years.
You can't take the sky from me...
Ive seen this circulating the blog already, and did a little investigating. Turns out some aspects of this story are less then credible.
Lets start with the source of the article, one Steven Milloy - you can see his name is on that particular version of it, as well as some others. A quick background check, placing his name into google, reveals that Steven Milloy is a quite enthusiastic campagigner against climate-change reducing initiatives - ironicly, he labels it 'junk science' - as well as opposed to environmental concerns in general. His wikipedia page goes into more detail. He also runs junkscience.com - just your plain old astroturf site, that will label any part of science junk for a suitable fee. And yes, I checked its the same Stephen Milloy. The attribution at the end of the article confirms it.
I could spend a lot of time going into Milloy's record as a producer of scientific articles ranging from dubious to outright false, but lets not get distracted into the ad-homs here. Instead, how about a look at the criticism of the CFL scare from denialism.com - as the site points out, the level of mercury in a CFL is tiny - 5mg. Not to mention that CFL is just a new packageing for an old technology - the older tube-lights run on exactly the same princible and have been in use for a long time now. Have there been any major safety concerns about those? They contain much more mercury than a CFL, due simply to their larger volume. Thermometers contain a whole lot more than either - and who finds that they need to call in the hazmat squad if they break a thermometer?
The $2000 cleanup incident seems to be just an overreaction - an extreme case of 'better safe than sorry.' Or, this being america, perhaps 'better safe than liable.'
...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.
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?
Hm. So the guy above me makes a blatantly false claim, I (and several others) point out that he is wrong, and back it up with real facts -- and that makes me clueless. Slashdot debate at its finest.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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.
This is a Canadian right wing newspaper put out by the neocons at CanWest Global. Don't believe the anti-hype, this is all a concerted disinformation campaign being put on by the conservatives.
Salut,
Jacques
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.
This sentence is misleading in so many ways, it should be the subject of an article on JunkScience (which is published by the same asshat who wrote the article, oh Irony!).
5mg Hg per bulb is a voluntary industry cap, not the actual content. The article failed to mention the brand of bulb, but the vast majority of CFLs contain notably less than that. Philips produces a line of bulbs containing less than 2 mg Hg, for example, with 2.4-3 Hg being a more reasonable industry-wide benchmark and 4 mg Hg being a high mark.
The Maine "safety" standard is based on the natural occurrence of mercury rather than safe exposure levels. The purpose is to detect pollution above what could be potentially natural occurrences, not to ascertain immediate public health concerns. This is why the concentrations apply to soils instead of air. Maine also has some of the highest levels of mercury pollution in North America so they're (justifiably) edgy about the subject to begin with.
The MSDS for Mercury (PDF, page 6) lists poisoning concentrations start at eight hours of exposure at 44 mg Hg per cubic meter (or 0.15 mg over 46 days with notably fewer symptoms), which means you would have to be huffing the broken bulbs to really be in danger. Assuming this woman hasn't been breaking bulbs in her house every day for the past thirty years there is also no risk of chronic poisoning. In short: Open a window, you ain't gonna die.
=Smidge=
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.
http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/healthguidelines/mercuryv apor/recognition.html
Now, what sort of concentrations are generated from a spill of 5mg in an average sized bedroom?
FTFOA:
EXPOSURE LIMITS
* OSHA PEL The current Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) permissible exposure limit (PEL) for mercury vapor is 0.1 milligram per cubic meter (mg/m(3)) of air as a ceiling limit. A worker's exposure to mercury vapor shall at no time exceed this ceiling level.
* NIOSH REL
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has established a recommended exposure limit (REL) for mercury vapor of 0.05 mg/m(3) as a TWA for up to a 10-hour workday and a 40-hour workweek. NIOSH also assigns a "Skin" notation, which indicates that the cutaneous route of exposure, including mucous membranes and eyes, contributes to overall exposure [NIOSH 1992].
* ACGIH TLV
The American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH) has assigned mercury vapor a threshold limit value (TLV) of 0.025 mg/m(3) as a TWA for a normal 8-hour workday and a 40-hour workweek and considers mercury vapor an A4 substance (not classifiable as a human carcinogen). The ACGIH also assigns a "Skin" notation to mercury vapor [ACGIH 1994, p. 25].
* Rationale for Limits
The NIOSH limit is based on the risk of central nervous system damage, eye, skin, and respiratory tract irritation [NIOSH 1992].
The ACGIH has not published documentation for the current TLV for mercury vapor. The 1991 Documentation of Threshold Limit Values (6th edition) discusses the basis for the prior TLV of 0.05 mg/m(3), but does not discuss the current TLV for mercury vapor [ACGIH 1991, p. 881].
HEALTH HAZARD INFORMATION
* Routes of Exposure
Exposure to mercury vapor can occur through inhalation, and eye or skin contact.
* Summary of toxicology
1. Effects on Animals: Mercury vapor can damage the kidneys, liver, brain, heart, lungs and colon in experimental animals. It is also mutagenic and can affect the immune system. Rabbits exposed for a single 4 hour period to mercury vapor at a concentration of 28.8 mg/m(3) developed severe damage to the kidneys, liver, brain, heart, lungs, and colon [Clayton and Clayton 1981]. Rabbits exposed to 0.86 mg/m(3) for 6 weeks had significant brain and kidney damage, which resolved on cessation of exposure. Exposure to 6 mg/m(3) mercury vapor caused severe damage to the kidney, heart, lung, and brain of rabbits; however, dogs exposed to 0.1 mg/m(3) for 83 weeks had no microscopic indication of tissue damage [Clayton and Clayton 1981]. Mercury may injure the kidneys through an autoimmune mechanism [ACGIH 1991]. Mercury was mutagenic in eukaryotic cells [ACGIH 1991].
2. Effects on Humans: Mercury vapor can cause effects in the central and peripheral nervous systems, lungs, kidneys, skin and eyes in humans. It is also mutagenic and affects the immune system [Hathaway et al. 1991; Clayton and Clayton 1981; Rom 1992]. Acute exposure to high concentrations of mercury vapor causes severe respiratory damage, while chronic exposure to lower levels is primarily associated with central nervous system damage [Hathaway et al. 1991]. Chronic exposure to mercury is also associated with behavioral changes and alterations in peripheral nervous system [ACGIH 1991]. Pulmonary effects of mercury vapor inhalation include diffuse interstitial pneumonitis with profuse fibrinous exudation [Gosselin 1984]. Glomerular dysfunction and proteinuria have been observed mercury exposed workers [ACGIH 1991]. Chronic mercury exposure can cause discoloration of the cornea and lens, eyelid tremor and, rarely, disturbances of vision and extraocular muscles [Grant 1986]. Delayed hypersensitivity reactions have been reported in individuals exposed to mercury vapor [Clayton and Clayton 1981]. Mercury vapor is reported to b
The mistake was calling in the DEP in the first place.
EPA says "If a CFL breaks in your home, open nearby windows to disperse any vapor that may escape, carefully sweep up the fragments (do not use your hands) and wipe the area with a disposable paper towel to remove all glass fragments. Do not use a vacuum. Place all fragments in a sealed plastic bag and follow disposal instructions above."
I wonder if she has a thermostat in the house, with a mercury tilt switch? How about a digital (or quartz) watch, or any other device containing batteries containing mercury? Maybe a crib monitor?
Every now and then I've had an alkaline or nicad battery burst and release fumes. Should I have called the EPA and got a cleanup? Should I quit using battery-powered devices?
The standby power consumption of a TV set is the power needed to keep the REMOTE CONTROL receiver and associated microcontroller running all the time. If this wasn't done, then your remote wouldn't be able to turn the set on, because the circuitry that receives the signals from it would be dead.
The "instant on" story goes back to when TVs contained vacuum tubes, and required a minute or more to produce a picture from a cold start. Manufacturers discovered that if you kept the tube filaments warm all the time, startup time was greatly reduced. The fact that such circuits wasted gobs of electricity and burned down more than a few homes didn't matter much....
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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".
I remember years ago watching a program about Amazonian gold miners. They were extracting gold from sediment by mixing in mercury, which would bind to the tiny particles. Once they had a nice blob of amalgam, they would burn off the mercury with a blowtorch, leaving behind a nugget. They were evaporating gallons of mercury each, and breathing it - I can't imaging what they were doing to their own health, as well as their environment. It was appalling.
For those unfamiliar with superfund it requires, and pays for, cleanup of truly hazardous sites in the U.S. ranging from large-scale toxic spills (e.g. Love Canal New York) to military disposal sites and deliberate poisoning of the drinking water with nuclear waste (e.g. Project Chariot).
Such waste has often been produced by or with the support of the federal government in communities that have little resources to combat the problems. Dismissing it out of hand is only possible for those who've never been exposed to it and who don't care about the lives of others.
But then of course there's this:
CEI is a neoliberal thinktank that has been outspoken against any governmental environmental policy including action on global warming once stating that: "reducing these levels [Creenhouse gas emmissions], even in "baby steps," would "result in the deaths of more people in the U.S. than global warming would worldwide"
See also:
The above was taken from ElWiki
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
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.
FRAUD ALERT
The Financial Post article is typical scientific fraud, in my opinion. They apparently want you to read their publication so that you will see the ads, and they don't care how they get you to do it. They don't hire writers who understand the issues apparently, and they don't give their writers enough time to do research.
Look at these paragraphs from a June 20, 2006 article from the Oregonian newspaper, Mercury rules give kiln a pass, which is now available only to paid subscribers.
"As Oregon, with federal prodding, clamps down on mercury emitted by a Portland General Electric coal-fired power plant in Boardman, it leaves unregulated an Eastern Oregon factory that is a far larger source of the toxic compound.
"The state's biggest industrial source of airborne mercury is a cement kiln run by Kansas-based Ash Grove Cement Co. in the town of Durkee. Unaffected by federal laws aimed at coal-fired power plants, it released 632 pounds of mercury into the air in 2004, the last year when records are available, compared with 151 pounds emitted by PGE's facility."
Yes, compact fluorescent bulbs should be given to some agency to recycle them. But broken compact fluorescents are a small contribution to the total amount of mercury in the atmosphere, which is rapidly increasing by thousands of tons each year since China is increasing the number of coal-fired plants.