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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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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
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.........
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 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.
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.
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.'
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?
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.
As an often times admirer of things American I usually don't like comments that say "You must be American", but I'm afraid I can't avoid it here.
In Europe we've always had much more expensive energy than you guys in the USofA and by consequence we've for many years been keen adopters of money savers like these bulbs.
At the same time we've grown used to separating our waste and disposing of it in a safe way.
In (Continental!) Western Europe landfills are now the exception. Fluorescent bulbs have since many years been labelled as hazardous waste and are collected as such, as a matter of fact a retailer selling them has to provide a return point for recycling.
Like other dubious explanations of your constitution you might feel you have the right to dump anything in a landfill but that does not make it wise.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
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.