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Questions Arising On Mercury In Compact Fluorescents
Patchw0rk F0g sends in an article from MSNBC on how some environmentalists are having second thoughts on compact fluorescent bulbs. Their relative energy efficiency is unquestioned. The problem is the mercury — enough in one bulb to contaminate 1,000 gallons of water, even in newer low-mercury bulbs. The EPA has an 11-step cleanup process to follow when you break a CFL in your home. The specialized recycling facilities that are needed are thin on the ground — about one per county in California, one of seven states where it is illegal to dispose of CFLs in the general waste stream.
I only like CFLs because they lasted longer than incadescents.
Otherwise, they suck.
I really think LED will be the future of lighting in most situations. It's a long-lasting, mercury-free lightsource that can be targeted to any frequency. We are already seeing them used in Grow Light applications and other such things all the time. I think it will be a great day when we start seeing LED light installations just about everywhere we are using traditional lights today.
put the what in the where?
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Waaaaaaaaaaay behind the curve on everything. Generic news for generic people.
The Turing test cuts both ways
Seems to me a few of the so-called environmentally friendly technologies are just a temporary stopgap. It's not much different with hybrid cars, which are only a marginal improvement.
Shouldn't we be switching to the best possible solution that we have today, rather than letting the corporations milk the environment issue by giving us the new products in steps? Let's jump to LED solutions now. I'm sure there will be even better light sources in the future, but AFAIK this is a more advanced step that we could be taking right away rather than compromising with florescent.
This was on the BBC some months ago.
They were relatively reassuring about the health implications:
Something to be aware of, but not hugely worrying.
I think LED lighting is really the future, no mercury in them. I have some LED lighting myself and while I found it to be too dim still and a bit too focused for lighting a whole room, I really like how LED emitted light looks. LEDs are also insanely efficient, I don't notice any heat at all even when I place my hand on them. And the problems I mentioned will surely be fixed as brighter LEDs are developed.
I played with mercury as a child. We used to rub dimes on it, and push it around on a desk and i our hands. I had like 5 pounds of the stuff in a bottle, enough co contaminate the solar system if ne CFB contaminates 1000 gallons of water.
So I'll be dying soon, anybody want to buy a low slashdot ID?
Sheldon
Tag this post: getoffmylawn
I have asked this of people in the know for years now, and no one has been able to give an educated answer why trading inefficient incandescents for toxic CF bulbs is such an awesome thing. I love CF bulbs but it's just because they last several times longer than my old 100-watters. But I have never broken one, so maybe I would feel differently once I powered my kids' room with mercury. If I could afford it, I would buy all LED 'bulbs' for my house. But they are still prohibitively expensive.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Hasn't anyone thought about the higher components count being less environmentally friendly either? It takes ressources and energy to make those components. If it takes more energy to be created than it saves, what's the point?
LED's should be better and I've seen some artists create very beautiful lamps that wouldn't be possible with compact fluorescent bulbs.
And here is the rub. We use these lights because of Global Warming. Whether or not GW is natural or man made is still debated (regardless of what Al Gore tells you) and largely unknown.
The threat from mercury is 100% real. Don't believe me? Ask you baby's doctor how much tuna your baby can have.
So, can someone tell me why we use these bulbs, which cause a REAL problem to combat something that is still unknown?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
is not requiring the stores that push CFL to set up a recycle system. Home Depot and Walmart are busy pushing cheap bulbs from GE/China. They claim that they will last 5-7 years. Half of mine have burned out within 3 years. I have 8 bulbs waiting to recycle. Worse, I saw a GE/Made in China bulb catch on fire. I now buy Phillips/made in mexico only bulbs, but it does not solve the problem of mercury recycle.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I wish this story would go away. Mercury is released by burning coal for electricity, and the total amount released to the environment is much greater with conventional bulbs.
For one thing, some of us have light-induced migraines. Fluorescent-lights are often a contributing factor. Whether it's the light spectrum output, the AC frequency, or some placebo, whatever, in *my* case, fluorescent lights seem to be a *major* contributing factor. I'm all for efficiency, but this case, Incandescent light is one of the few things that I have a hard time letting go. I *need* incandescent light in order to make my living... Nary that, just to survive.
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
When are people going to realize that LEDs are the way of the future. Low power, safe, and affordable.
There's a much more substantial danger with asbestos. cigarette smoke. CO from your furnace, or from your attached garage. Radon. Electricity from the wall socket. And lead paint. These things seriously injure or kill thousands per year.
And now you tell me that mercury from my breaking-lightbulbs spree will kill my family tree? Good God!
The amount of mercury in a modern lightbulb is thousands of times less than what is found in a mercury thermometer or a thermostat. And let's not even begin to discuss the amount of mercury within traditional fluorescent bulbs and the amalgam in some fillings.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
The article barely mentioned the real facts. The power production for regular light bulbs over the lifespan of a CFL generates 2-3x as much mercury as is in the CFL. They are just fine.
Now it is a bit of a problem right now finding a place that will recycle them. Ikea is doing it, and Walmart is thinking of rolling out recycling bins in their stores. But industry needs a lot more motivation to start taking these back. Ideally most municipal recycling programs would allow the bulbs to be placed in their bins (maybe in cardboard protectors or something. A decent article would have focused on this aspect of the story, and it was again just mentioned in passing.
Perhaps I missed it, but where in the article do they discuss the massive amount of mercury emitted by coal burning power plants?
I honestly tried to like CFL bulbs. My first thought was how they take a full minute to achieve maximum brightness. Unacceptable. My vacuum tube amplifier only takes 10 seconds to heat up. The biggest gripe is the color temperature. you have a choice of sickly yellow and pure LED white. Neither look like sunlight or GE Reveal bulbs. I bought a two pack of "instant on" CFL bulbs for my bathroom and one went bad days later. It would only flicker and never fully light. 8 bucks wasted right there.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Honestly, this is my biggest problem with the environmental movement in the US today, it's never satisfied with even the slightest amount of progress. Fossil fuels are unacceptable because they pollute, but so is wind power because it interferes with migration paths. Incandescent bulbs are inefficient but we can't use CFL's because they contain mercury. We want the fuel efficiency that diesel engines already offer but we can't buy them in the US because of sulfur emission regulation. Everything has trade-offs. Sometimes you just have to pick the lesser of the two evils and go with it.
If you are in an office or school, look overhead and determine what type of lighting you have. There are a lot of places where it is fluorescent lighting in the long tube format.
Said tubes also contain mercury. But few, if any people, seem to consider these as part of the mercury contamination controversy.
If these tubes aren't a problem because they are disposed of properly, couldn't the CFLs be put into the same disposal chain?
And if the tubes ARE a problem because of improper disposal, shouldn't they also be mentioned along with the CFLs?
That's news to me. I'm sure it is but you can't just write a law like that and then put it on display in a locked cabinet in some basement somewhere with a broken sewer line. You actually have to advertise it. The funny thing is I have a broken CFL in my house right now. I have it because my wife accidentally knocked it off the shelf and the packaging while shear resistant doesn't pad the bulbs at all so it broke. Since she broke it, she bought it. So now how exactly am I supposed to deal with that?! I doubt even the hazerdous waste place will take a broken bulb.
If the mercury contamination from coal burning is going into the air, then it is also ending up in our drinking water, plus lots of other places.
It's not elemental mercury that does damage, but mercury that has been included into organic molecules by other organisms that you eat, such as fish (which in turn ate smaller animals with mercury and so concentrated the environmental mercury for your inconvenience). There was a lot of talk about the evils of mercury fillings but of all the millions of people who have them, practically none of them has ever had mercury poisoning as a result - but what is the cancer risk from having epoxy resin slowly degrading in your mouth?
There is an awful lot of FUD around the dangers of mercury and other heavy metals.
And just to demonstrate, I shall now drink this cup of mercury whilst reciting the first chapter of Alice in Wonderland backwards.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
... is that the percentage of mercury in a CFL bulb is likely NEVER to make it into the water table unless they pump from the very very bottom of the water table/tank. Mercury is so heavy it automatically sinkss to the bottom of whatever is storing it with water. Memphis Light, Gas, and Water (mlgw.com) has noted this in their water treatment plants for YEARS when concern about their aquifers and mercury hit the news. It's a non-issue for the most part unless the water pumps hit so far at the bottom that they suck up mercury. This is why Memphis has some of the best aquifer water there is on the planet.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
, they will STILL reduce the overall mercury emission into the environment over their lifetime, compared to equivalent incandescent bulbs.
Mercury (and uranium!) is present in the smokestack emissions from coal-burning powerplants. By reducing the amount of electricity used, CFLs actually reduce overall mercury emissions. And since the mercury they do contain is in a sealed glass tube (as opposed to being spewed into the atmosphere and settling out onto the ground), their toxic content is easily managed through recycling efforts.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Thanks for the thinking-impaired redeck troll perspective. You may want to go here for all your 'information' needs from now on.
From Congresscritters all the way down to Walmart, everybody jumped on the CFL bandwagon to appease the greens. Nobody cared about discussing consequences then, it was all about shutting up the greens and being able to put a little halo on yer head and tell everybody how much better you were because YOU cared about 'saving the earth.'
But there ain't no hollow earth, no happy ever after and no free lunch. Everything is a balance, a trade off. Yes CFLs save energy, but there were lots of reasons why they weren't flying off store shelves. But none of that mattered, if people wouldn't rationally make the choices greens thought they should be then there was obviously something wrong with 'ordinary people' and the government would just have to make the 'right' decision for em and outlaw incandescent bulbs. And the lesson we can now take is that trying to appease greens will never work, because we aren't even a year out from their great 'success' in forcing CFLs down our throats and they are pissed all over again.
Democrat delenda est
It's not enough to say the dangers of mercury are certain but the environmental benefit is not. You need to assess the magnitude of the risk. I understand that the consequences of global warming could be catastrophic. The overall dangers of widespread CFL bulbs use are relatively insignificant. It's an expected value calculation: probability times magnitude.
500kg of mercury is less than 10 gallons and that's the same as 100,000,000 CF bulbs.
If you eat 11oz of Yellowfin each week, you'll consume the same amount of mercury as eating 1 CF lightbulb each year, or 4oz of swordfish each week.
Ladies and gentlemen, a bit of math.
Amount of mercury in 1 CFL light bulb: 5 milligrams (source: TFA)
Amount of energy saved by using a CFL bulb instead of incandescent, over the lifetime of the CFL:
10,000 hours * 75 watts * 75% energy savings = 0.6 megawatt-hours
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp#Lifespan)
Fraction of that energy that would be generated by coal-fired power plants: about 50%.
(http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat1p1.html)
Coal power plant energy savings: 0.3 megawatt-hours
Annual emission of mercury by US coal-fired power plants: 48 tons/year in 1999
(http://www.nescaum.org/documents/rpt031104mercury.pdf)
Power output of US coal-fired power plants: 1,900,000 gigawatt-hours in 1999 (about the same today)
Mercury emitted by coal plants: 48 tons / 19000000 GWh = 23 milligrams per megawatt-hour
Power-plant mercury emissions avoided by using a CFL bulb over its lifetime:
7 milligrams
So it's a wash. The amount of mercury in the bulb is roughly the same as what would be emitted by a coal-burning power plant, if you stuck with incandescent bulbs.
But the mercury in a CFL bulb is a lot easier to clean up than the stuff spewed into the atmosphere by power plants.
No problem; they'll just do what the printer ink cartridge manufacturers do: Build in a chip that commits suicide after some specified period of time. That could be in hours of operation, or even calendar time. In the latter case, you're virtually renting them.
I buy incandescent. They are more environmentally friendly. Don't contain mercury, don't contain PCBs, take less material and energy to create, I could go on.
I use this same argument for the all the morons dumping their newish ~30MPG cars for a Prius or other hybrid. My 1990 Honda Accord that still gets ~30MPG is more friendly to the environment if I just continue to drive it until it stops work, than if I were to sell it off and get a Prius. Thus creating demand to expend more energy and materials to create another car that also contains many more nasty unevironmentally friendly toxins than my 18 year old commuter.
You could make the same argument about low-flow showerheads or toilets or plumbing fixtures in general (how long to those last).
People still remodel, new houses are built, old houses are destroyed, people break them, someone will come up with a new lighting mechanism (maybe that aluminum foil micro plasma lighting will become popular), and people will go through another replacement cycle.
"BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor" tag?
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
How about you leave your address here, and let me send a small amount of mercury. I will see to it that it is about the same amount as what you would get from tuna if you ate it everyday for 3 weeks. Just drink it, and then post on /. about 3 days later. Of course, we will need to exchange some legal docs first. I do not want to be held liable, but I promise you that I will keep it to just that small amount, that I promised.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
So how many people are unaware of this danger?
How many of these bulbs are being thrown out in the garbage? does my local government know how to handle CFL's (I will have to find out).
History repeats itself, people are stupid. This is a prime example of people in a responsible position going ahead with a 'bright idea' and not thinking ahead.
Yet another unnecessary man-made environmental problem. thanks stupid guys.
cc
PS. I am happy to know about it now.
People will probably complain that a lot of those LED's have circuits that cause them to blink. Any LED with a dimmer blinks.
I called the phone number to get a replacement bulb for one that burned out about two months ago and they mailed me a new one. When I got it it was broken in the shipping box and when I called the number for a replacement one I said I would prefer not to get the broken one out to read the numbers because I know they contain mercury. The customer service rep told me the mercury was contained within the base of the bulb and I was at no risk even if the bulb was broken.
I was skeptical and did not handle the bulb. Thoughts?
The mercury released by burning coal to produce the extra electricity needed to power a standard incandescent lightbulb exceeds that in a CFC bulb. I'm not at all sure about the exact quantities involved, and, of course, all the extra electricity needed to power incandescent bulbs is not necessarily produced by burning coal.
One thing that should be remembered about the current regulations for mercury are very strict in contrast to the levels associated with deterministic effects. This is perfectly natural since the natural occurrence of mercury is in such low concentrations. In fact almost all practical problems with mercury and how to deal with it are somehow linked to the inability to accurately measure it at the concentrations it begins to harm organisms.
Second, the speciation (division between different compounds) of mercury makes a huge difference in how the body absorbs it. The elemental form, found in old thermometers, switches and these CFL's, is practically biologically unavailable when liquid. There was a man in Taiwan who drank, IIRC, around a kilo without permanent effects. Oxidized mercury (HgCl2, Hg(NO3)2, and a few others) are also generally quite unavailable--several were used as syphilis medicine for quite some time--but led to a number of occupational hazards and poisonings. Mercury sulphide, on the other hand, is so unavailable that it's considered a "retirement path" in the mercury cycle. Among the variety of questionable Chinese medicine are "herbal balls," which have been found to contain up to 1.2 g (over a hundred CFL bulbs worth of mercury) of HgS. Finally, there are organic mercury compounds which are extremely toxic, but these are irrelevant except when they are produced by man in large quantities (though not necessarily on purpose) or when large amounts of inorganic mercury are available to anaerobic bacteria.
Almost all large-scale mercury poisoning has been due to the organic form entering the food supply.
However, though elemental, the form found in CFL's would most likely be vaporized if it got loose in your home. Vaporized elemental mercury is readily absorbed into the lungs, and can cross the blood-brain barrier, leading to temporary neurological effects in the few well-studied cases of household aspiration of the elemental form. Irritability and hyperactivity are typical symptoms.
Five milligrams is a good round number for the Hg content of a single CFL bulb. What is that for a person? 0.1 ppm? Well, the onset of symptoms in the victims of the Minamata disease (organic mercury poisoning) was a hair concentration of around 50 - 125 ppm (as mentioned, the margin of error on everything related to mercury is HUGE). Ca 100 ppm blood concentrations were found in the mothers of newborns in Iraq after an incident there with fungicide-laced grain in the 1970's. Again, uncertainty is the rule, and due to widely-varying affinities for heavy metals between different organs, there's very little one can predict in a given incident.
On a side note, while doing my thesis on a power plant mercury control system, I found my first grey hairs.
Compact florescent efficiency only begins when you need to turn on your air conditioner, otherwise they don't do much good unless they are being used in an environment that doesn't need to be heated. This is due to the energy offset provided by the light to heat the room that can be removed from the heating units energy cost.
... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_flourescent
"The 'inefficiencies' of incandescent lightbulbs in cold countries are virtually zero, since the generated heat offsets some of the need for central heating."
Many countries, including the US and China have decreed an end to incandescent bulbs. The number of compact fluorescents are about to hugely increase in number. Yes, the amount of mercury per bulb is small but when they're the only bulbs available to billions of people that small amount will become significant. Without a good recycling system this will become a greater environmental issue.
I'm sure urban environments will do fine with recycling. I wouldn't want to bet on that in rural China if I got my water from local wells. Or rural Mississippi for that matter.
The latest energy bill signed by President Bush requires the phase out of incandescents to either begin or be complete ( I don't recall which) by 2012.
Shit. I was in the weight room for like an hour after I think 3 of the tube type ones fell and shattered. Does that mean I'm gonna die now?
According to industry information, standard flourescent tubes like the 40W T12 in your office ceiling contain 2-6 times more mercury than a compact fluorescent. Bulbs like these have been in use for almost 70 years, and there are now literally billions of tubes in use worldwide without any published evidence of widespread mercury poisioning from them (most of the environmental rise in mercury, such as affected the Japanese fishing industry, is from commercial chemical proccessing and power plants). If this type of article raises awarness of mercury problems and leads to a recycling program as comprehensive as that for lead in car batteries, then it is a useful thing. If this article is another industry subsidized lobbyist attempt to smear 'environmentalists', then it is not helpful to the public debate at all. Unfortunately it is probably the later, since it chooses to cite the non-news incident of Ms. Bridges, which was first widely reported by the conservative pundits (NOT real news media) about a year ago.
Back in the long ago, streetlamps were powered by gas. Every evening, a person called a lamplighter would come and light the streetlight. (The bars sticking sideways out of lampposts were not decorative. They were there so a lamplighter could lean his ladder against them so he could climb the pole.) Every morning he would go around and extinguish the streetlights.
Gas lights did not use an open flame for lighting (well, they did, but not for long). They used a special cloth "wick" called a mantle. This mantle glowed brightly when heated by the gas flame. Over time, the mantles would disintegrate, and new ones would have to be installed.
Now there were two once vibrant sectors of the lighting industry that have been virtually eliminated by progress. Sure, a few thousand people lost jobs. There were better, cheaper, safer alternatives, so people used them. The same thing will happen with the incandescent bulb makers, and the fluorescent bulb makers. LEDs are a better, cheaper, safer alternative. A few thousand people will be put out of work, and once vibrant sectors of the lighting industry will fade away. Sure, a few companies will hang on, doing specialty work, but count on GE, Sylvania, Philips, and their ilk closing a lot of bulb factories in the future.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
it's never satisfied with even the slightest amount of progress.
That is because the environmental movement (and most others) isn't about fixing things, they are about bitching about things.
Most of the people involved in the environmental movement really want to be yelling at their Dad, but they are cowards so they use Society as a surrogate to yell at.
Others (and sometimes both) are narcissists. These are the people that in the middle ages went around wearing hair-shirts and beating themselves with scourges. They want to make a spectacle of themselves so you can see how morally superior they are.
A third group is just power hungry. Bitching means they have power (a voice). If things get fixed they lose their power. You see this most in the modern feminist movement.
It really isn't about the environment. It is about them.
PS & OT:
Has anyone else noticed that the subject line is gettign reset during the Preview screen?
Seriously this campain against the incandescent bulb is stupid. Ok so an incandecent lamp is about 10% efficent, fine. Guess what though that is a LIE. The way I use them (at night in my home) about 9 months of the year I want the heat (northeast Ohio). So actually I am getting very effiecent use of the electrical power it takes run that bulb.
So in exchange for some energy savings in the summer months with the CFL we get to dispose of the plastic bases which are most likey not biodegradeable and or pay to recycle them. We also get to put all sorts of toxic chemistry like phosphorse and mercury into the ground or USE more energy to run some sort of facility to properly process and dispose of these things. Gee you know what that old incandescent bulb is starting to look pretty friendly to the environment by comparision.
I am not saying CFLs are bad, they just should not be used everywhere as "the green" solution there are situations where they are appropriate and ones where they are not. They work great on the garage door opener for instance. I don't want to heat the garage ever(well very rarely) and they are less vibration sensitive then incandecents. So there is a real energy saving their probably.
All this legislation to end the incandecent bulp is really short sited. Technology should be used where it fits. Judgements should be made on a situation basis. Take CAFE standards, lay all the BS about whats a truck whats a car aside, you still have the dumb standards in the first place. I can't run my engine as hot and lean as the metal would allow, because if I do the NOx emmission will be through the roof. The thing is by running it cooler its less efficent more gas is burned resulting in more other kinds of emmissions. There is also major negative impact from harvesting and refineing oil in the first place that is being ignored. If we could five mpg more out of current technology ICEs just by relaxing the NOx emmisions rules it might well be a win, especially with the availibility issues with oil we are starting to see.
Our entire eco-policy is total BS that might as well have been written by poo-slinging monkeys. There are some obvious common sense rules about disposal of dangerous materials beyond that its fair to say we should legislate that blaten waste of energy not be allowed. Perhaps you should not be allowed to air condition your home to a temp of less then 74 without a medical waivor and or heat it beyond 69. Maybe it should be illegal to drive a vehicle that is larger then X sq feet without multiple occupants or cargo. Want to own that SUV? then you need a small car when its just you driving to work etc etc. This all needs careful though and it needs to be done on a local level.
I know that makes it hard for big manufacturers to deal with but whats sensible in Northern Ohio might not make sense for Southern Texas. Its time we swallow the hard pill and realize that we need to try and use our brains to solve our energey and pollution problems and that means all our brains yours, mine, and bill over in San Franciso. We can't expect some fuck'wit in Washington DC to fix everything.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
If you buy a prius or some other hybrid, that is getting say 40-50 MPG, then you just gained 10-20 MPGs. You will then sell your 30 mpg car to somebody else, they will probably use it to replace a car that gets 15-20 MPGs, i.e. an increase of 10-15 MPGs. That car may be sold to somebody who trashes a car that gets rid of a car that gets only 5-15 mpg. All in all, ppl are currently trading lower mileage cars for higher mileage cars. This is the same argument that economist like to use about ppl spending money locally. IOW, you gain only 20-50% increase in mileage, but other cars increased as well. The real issue for the west is that we need to be buying not just higher mileage cars, but ones that can run on other fuels.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Problem is, if the LED industry never sells replacement bulbs/tubes/whatever, it will die from lack of revenue. And all the accumulated knowledge and expertise will die. How can we keep the industry going while we enjoy the LED's durability and energy efficiency?
LEDs, one way to make them is with arsenic. Now one diode of arsenic is nothing, put billions in the dump, let the plastics rot a bit and...
You missed the point. LEDs DO NOT GO IN THE DUMP AT ALL, because they pretty much 'never' burn out.
paintball
If you eat 11oz of Yellowfin each week, you'll consume the same amount of mercury as eating 1 CF lightbulb each year, or 4oz of swordfish each week. ...You've apparently never tried to light a room with swordfish.
paintball
I think when talking about the toxic chemicals, even in older high-Hg CFLs, you have to consider their incredible lifetime. Because of the low quantities involved compared to incandescents, it is reasonable to expect that they can be recycled properly without causing a lot of overhead for recycling centers. Over here in Europe most councils provide recycling facilities for dangerous substances such as medication and batteries.
Maybe these are statistical norms for hazardous amounts of mercury. I have a young relative who had a CF bulb break at night while he was sleeping. It took months of doctor visits to figure out he had mercury poisoning, and about a year of treatment before he was better. It seems like the hazard is being under reported.
> A lens can diffuse the beam, and they currently exist in red, green, and blue forms that could
> be combined into the proper color temperature.
That won't work. There is a good reason white LEDs aren't just tri-color LEDs without seperate leads. See the slashdot story from this weekend about the artist exploiting the monochromatic light of LEDs to produce interesting effects when illuminating paintings. If you mix primary colors to get yellow paint, paint something with it and shine a yellow LED on it you see black. Oops! Guess that is why white LEDs use a deep blue or UV LED with a fluorescent coating inside the package. A LASER diode would of course be an even more extremely monochromatic light source than a normal LED, plus the unexpected problems of illuminating ordinary scenes with coherent light.
Democrat delenda est
This was disclosed in the msnbc.com but not on the TV news channel... General Electric Corp., the world's largest maker of traditional bulbs, said that by 2010, it hoped to have on the market a new high-efficiency incandescent bulb that will be four times as efficient as today's 125-year-old technology. It said that such bulbs would closely rival fluorescent bulbs for efficiency, with no mercury.
(Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft Corp. and NBC Universal, which is a division of General Electric.) It's probably true, but with todays media who knows?? This will probably get burried because I'm a lowly AC...
1. The extraction process for the purified Hg in the CFL wastes about 40% on a worldwide basis. This is the amount estimated to enter the air, landfills, and waterways, not the amount trapped in ore. If a CFL meets the guidelines and contains around 4mg (most don't, BTW- more like 6mg), the "real" mercury impact intrinsic to the bulb is 5.6mg.
2. The figures often state that a CFL will use 4mg of Hg intrinsically and 2.4mg from power consumption (coal gen=/.0234 mg/kW*h,23W bulb,4500 hr ave life), while incandescents would use 10mg from power consumption alone. Well, only half the US energy grid is coal- to the real figures are more like 5mg or so for incandescents and 6.8mg or so for CFL's.
3. CFL's don't meet their life rating that often. Using a CFL in one hour increments reduces the life by a whopping 50% (Lawrence Livermore Labs test). The incandescent life is reduced by 20%. Even with simplistic math, this is a whopper. CFL's in this case would use a minimum of 12.4mg of mercury compared to around 5mg for incandescents.
The result of all this is that CFL's use a lot more Hg than incandescents, and multiplied by the number of bulbs in your home and the households in the US, we are talking serious potential problems. Recycling? Ha. Last time I checked, smoke alarms were somewhere in the 1/10 of 1% range for being properly disposed of. People don't care- and our outlook ought to reflect that.
Use LED's. Period.
I've often stated that I would rather suffer global warming than get poisoned. Low "carbon footprint" and energy efficient really must be clean too. Else there is no point. We did clean up our energy and industry compared to 50 years ago. And some of the trade offs we made in the past were; less sulfur and NOx, and more CO2.
Screw recycling plastic bottles and alkaline cells. I think people should really focus on sorting garbage from toxic waste instead of fretting over sorting recycling. Where I live people just dump rotten garbage into the recycling bins anyways, there are a lot of people around me that are not from the US and came from countries where the concept of recycling is foreign to them. (would be nice if some Spanish/Vietnamese/etc language public service announcements would be put out)
I was embarrassed for Hillary when she answered a child's question of what she could do about the environment with the idiotic response of "use CFLs". That might help lower energy usage, but it's not good for the environment. (at least the current implementation of CFL installation in the residential sector)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I found an EPA document from September 2002 (linked below) saying that during a 5 year span, a lamp running a CFL which is then thrown in the trash will release less mercury overall into the environment than a lamp running incandescent bulbs for the same time span. This is because the power required to run the incandescent bulbs has the coal power plant outputting a lot more mercury.
Does anyone know if the EPA still says this, or if the number are still believed to be true? If so, wouldn't that destroy this entire article? Unless of course you're worried about 5-ish year's worth of mercury being concentrated in one location. But, the article cites the waste stream, ground water, air, and landfills as the problem location, as well as localized breakage.
The fact sheet can be found at http://www.arlingtonva.us/Departments/Topics/Documents/9662MercuryCFL.pdf
http://ledtheway.com/
Oh no! CFL's have mercury in them! It's an environmental catastrophe just waiting to happen! Why, just think if we let these bulbs get into schools, offices and public buildings!
Oh wait. All of those places are ALREADY lit with fluorescent bulbs that contain mercury.
Feel free to panic whenever you like folks.
They were bought at Home Depot about 6 months ago. Its a GE FLE26HT3/2/D. 26 Watt cool white.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
The problem is the mercury -- enough in one bulb to contaminate 1,000 gallons of water, even in newer low-mercury bulbs.
The number on another scaremongering article was 6,000.
Either way...
There's a gaping flaw in the logic that if you count PPM for a safe dose, look at the volume, then multiply up. It assumes the mercury is even close to equally disolved in that water.
If a drop, the volume of which is found in a typical CFL, dropped in to a thousand gallons of water and sank to the bottom, whilst I wouldn't happily do so, I'd still be willing to drink a glass from off to the side of where that drop went in. A little more nervously, I'd still be willing to do so a few weeks later, assuming the drop was still largely intact at the bottom.
On the flip side, let that drop sink in to a million gallons of water, thus apparently a thousand times under the "safe dose"... and I challenge anyone to be willing to drink the cupfull taken from where the drop sank, original drop included.
Yes, mercury is bad for you. It turns you in to a character in Alice In Wonderland.
On the other hand, we're druming up fear by pointing to a perfect distribution and the safe level (accepting that safe levels are usually many times lower than the point at which harm is a likelihood that's why they're called "safe" not "minimal risk" levels).
If you're going to get your panties in a bunch about that, you'd better not each fish (particularly swordfish, shark, smallmouth bass and pickerel). With an FDA "safe for human consumption" of 1ppm, shark ranged 0.30-3.53ppm in samples tested, averaging 0.88ppm and swordfish at 0.36-1.68ppm, averaging at 0.88 (FDA).
By comparison, the mercury maybe getting out of a bulb, disolved properly in to ground water, getting in to the water supply and failing to get filtered past the safe level is somewhat less of a risk than the statistical variance that means you'll almost certainly clear the safe levels in at least one case if you have a nice swordfish steak half a dozen times at your favorite restaurant.
Neither is likely to do you much harm. In both cases, getting in to your car and driving to work is a vastly greater risk, yet it puts the silliness of the debate in context when simply eating fish is far worse for you (on that one very limited axis).
First off, you are right. On one had it is absolutely ridiculous the way some people complain about these things. That being said I think that overall it might be good for this to get more public attention.
Not so that people will not get CFLs, but so that we can think, as a country, about recycling and disposing of them properly. I especially think we should expect companies like Wal-Mart, who are really pushing CFLs to incorporate some type of recycle/disposal system into their stores. Let's be honest, while the marketing PR is about being more eco-friendly, a place like Wal-Mart is only doing it as they see huge profits in their future. It is not unreasonable for us to expect that they could use a small percentage of that profit to help us keep them out of the landfills. After all that would make the 'eco-friendly' PR talk a lot more accurate.
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If your electricity comes from coal, the power saved by a CFB prevents a greater amount of heavy metals (including mercury) from being dumped into the air, water and ground downwind of the coal plant. I like eating fish, how about you? This argument won me over, I hope it was not a lie designed to sell me a bunch of expensive light bulbs.
The service life of CFBs and regular bulbs makes me suspicious. CFBs do not last much longer than incandescent bulbs used to. I've had 2 of 12 burn out over a year or so despite the 5 year promise on the box. Incandescent bulbs used to be that good and halogen incandescent bulbs still last longer than CFBs. Ask yourself when the last time you changed your car headlights was.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There are still a lot of Slashdotters that don't know what the hell they are talking about, including some in this thread.
Japanese scientist: Technically, sir, tomatoes are fags. Military scientist: He means fruits.
I had a CFL crumble and bust when I unscrewed it while it was on - and I only applied enough gription to twist it from the socket, no more. Something about the tight bends on the glass tubes creates a very thin layer of glass in places, it actually felt mushy before it popped, and these things don't get but 100degF? (I just grabbed the one over my head and it is uncomfortably warm but no more than hot faucet water - 120?)
The amounc of mercury in CF's is indeed a VERY SMALL AMOUNT compared to what I've personally SEEN, and heard about others being exposed to:
When I was a child at the pediatrician's examining room (40+ years ago) they used blood pressure meters (whatever they were called) that used MERCURY in them, much like a thermometer. The mercury went up and down in a vertical glass tube driven by air pressure in the arm cuff, indicating blood pressure. I saw one that was BROKEN with the mercury pooling in the bottom of the case. The doctor saw it was broken and removed it from the room, and came back with another of the same model that wasn't broken, and of course measured my blood pressure with it.
In a high school science class there was a plastic squirt-bottle of mercury, and a girl had put a drop into the palm of her hand and was playing with it, pushing it around with a finger. The teacher came in and saw what she was doing, and he calmly but firmly told her "When you're through playing with that, carefully put it all back into the bottle, and before you eat lunch, be sure to was your hands very, very thoroughly." I was rather interested in playing with it myself, but after hearing the teacher say that, it reminded me that mercury was Not Safe, that a very small amount ingested could kill (MUCH less than what that girl held in her hand!) and I lost any interest in touching it. Thinking about it now, I'd be surprised if there is ANY such mercury in high school science classes or labs thesedays that isn't left over and long-forgotten from decades ago.
As an adult an aquaintance told about remodeling old houses and taking the mercury out of old nechanican thermostats (they used mercury in a glass tube that tilted one way would connect two wires stuck into the tube, turning on the heating system. The tube was mounted on a spiral of bimetallic metal, which would change the tilt with temperature). He told of putting the mercury into a jug, that they had collected the mercury from dozens of those things, then someone stole the jug (one can only hope the thief disposed of it properly).
Mercury is indeed dangerous to human health, and it's good to know that "CF's have such-ahd-such amount of mercury in them." As I've grown older, optimizing my health and safety have become more important to me (I don't drive drunk, because, well I don't drink - I quit smoking 16 years ago, always wear my seat belt, eat healthier, get some exercise, etc) but the amount in CF bulbs is not a particular worry for me, and doesn't stop me from buying and using them out of fear that one might break with me in the room.
Tag lost or not installed.
What's really exciting to me is OLED lighting. Imagine entire walls, floors, and/or ceilings of light.
I like to have really bright lighting, but I hate that it comes from a few small points. Looking at a "bulb" (whether incandescent, CFL, or LED) is unpleasant and painful to my eyes. With OLED lighting, I can have much more light without any single point being too bright.
Mass availability of OLED lighting is still a way off, but it sure looks promising:
Start-up creates flexible sheets of light
I bought a 36 bulb white LED Xmas string for $6. While these are admittedly bargain-basement LEDs whose color fidelity isn't all that great, I expect that in volume production, LED "bulb" costs will be comparable to CFLs. At this point, the CFL disappears. Except for the installed base.
Tech Public Policy stuff
When I was in High School (not all that long ago) they had a bottle of mercury - about the size of a shampoo bottle they passed around for all of us to feel how heavy it was. I remember it was very very heavy - so heavy we could barley lift it. So heavy, that the cheap plastic bottle it was in was bending and warping under its own weight - as if it would have complete broken apart if it wasn't held perfectly upright. No wonder the shut the place down. (It was the real-life school from the book "Crazy School").
Even in the US 50% of electricity is generated with coal. Yes, it's bizarre that it is still so, but it's true.
In the rest of the world the situation is considerably worse. Where were your lamps made? I don't think the steel poles that streetlamps are made from come from an area where nuclear and hydro are the predominate source of electricity. It's highly doubtful that the lamps at your local hardware store are made in such a place.
And then there's the fact that smelting of steel isn't done with electricity. They pile the steel scraps into a huge chimney that's mostly full of coal, light it up and then force air in until the heat from the coal heats the steel enough to melt. A very carbon intensive process, this. This is the part the part that uses the most fossil fuels for almost anything made of steel, no matter how it spends the rest of its life.
Compared to these issues the energy burned by the bulb is probably a trivial fragment of the total carbon budget for a light. Every little bit helps though.
Some of the realities of carbon output are pretty scary. All tars exposed to an oxygen atmosphere are oxidizing (slowly burning). That means every square inch of asphalt between your house and your job are doing their bit to add to global warming, and contribute a considerable fraction compared to the fuel powered vehicles driving over it. The road burns whether you're driving over it or not, so all those huge vacant K-Mart parking lots add up to quite a lot.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I agree with Twitter. Quote: "If your electricity comes from coal, the power saved by a CFB prevents a greater amount of heavy metals (including mercury) from being dumped into the air, water and ground downwind of the coal plant."
This is not the first time a Slashdot article has misled us about mercury in compact fluorescent light bulbs. See this comment from a year ago: Misleading article. Quote from the second link in that comment: "China is also the world's largest emitter of mercury..." China's coal-fired plants emit TONS of mercury, and the mercury travels everywhere.
Is someone at Slashdot paid to post these articles, to sell LED or other lights? Or is it just ignorance?
So called "white" LEDs are actually blue or violet LEDs that have a dab of phosphor on the chip. The phosphor eventually gets dimmer and dimmer, just like the pixels on a plasma TV screen, or the burn-in on a CRT screen. Even compact fluorescents exhibit this burn-in dimming over time, I had a number of the old U-shaped compact fluorescents with magnetic ballasts at one time, and they still worked but just weren't as bright as when new, so I changed them out for newer corkscrew fluorescents.
I have some white LEDs in a few projects I built when they first came out, and some are already turning bluish-pink as the phosphors fade.
while CFL mercury is a problem, the mercury emissions from the amount of coal it takes to burn to feed incandescent bulbs that would not be required to burn to feed the far more efficient CFLs far more than offsets the mercury in a CFL.
Modern CFLs also have a far longer lifespan. Buy a set now, and they may still be going by the time low-cost good light quality LED lamps are available for standard 120V lamp bases. Though I'm interested in seeing what manufacturers will do with indoor lighting that is not constrained to conventional screw-in lamp bases. (at LED lifespan, they might as well be soldered in)
Tech Public Policy stuff
Right now I only use fluorescent bulbs in the basement and some places where everybody forgets to turn the light off
Of the 7 light fixtures in the apartment I live in I have 6 have with CFLs. The one that does not have them I rarely ever use.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Are you done trolling for the day?
Much like CFLs, I don't think there is an LED light which will produce light output equivalent to that of a 100-watt incandescent bulb,
Greenlite 26WELSM - 26 Watt Mini Spiral 100 Watt Replacement. Edison Opto has introduced a 100 Watt single-package LED.
FalconShould there be a Law?
They need a transformer or some electronics to convert the voltage. That's where they will build in the flaws to keep you buying. It's already affecting the fluorescents in my place. They're not lasting very long.
Used almost daily I've had CFLs last more than 10 years. The first one I bought lasted about 15.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Why should cost be an issue?
LED lights really could finish off the lightbulb industry. If everybody started buying them then sales would plummet after a few years, the only sales would be for new houses and people who were remodelling their existing lighting designs (only a small percentage of the population would actually do this).
No sig today...
You stop making "bulbs" and start building the LEDs into the lighting fixture. Every time people redecorate they'll change the fixture and you get some money.
No sig today...
You insensitive clod, they are talking about Freddy Mercury, can't you read ?
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
The hippies *need* something to be angry about and the grumps need something so they can say "see, told you so!".
If we take this away from them they might start paying attention to the real issues... and we can't have that now, can we?
No sig today...
... not just for "modern", "compact" fluorescent lamps.
For as long as I've had anything to do with industry (20+ years now), I've known that fluorescent lamps have non-zero quantities of mercury in them, and therefore can't be disposed of by throwing into the bin. Instead, when a fluorescent lamp dies, you take it down to the electrician's workshop and carefully place it in the appropriate storage bin for return to shore for recycling. That applies for 6ft fluorescent tubes, 3ft tubes, 2ft tubes, 60cm rings, 40cm rings, and now "compacts". They're all fundamentally the same technology, with the same disposal issues.
Why is there a fuss about these things in the last year or so? I guess it's a confluence of two things : for decades the retail sellers of fluorescents have failed to provide a "back channel" for returning failed fluorescents (I guess that's the result of vigorous lobbying by those companies, who don't want the associated costs) ; and secondarily the incandescant lamp manufacturers are feeling the fear of their market drying up, and are indulging in FUD tactics.
This is SlashDot - FUD is recognised as an illegitimate rhetorical technique.
For what it's worth, my score card with fluorescents : brought house in 1993 ; changed all lamps as they failed to either CFL, SFL (for "Strip Fluorescent Lamp"), or RFL ("Ring FL") as the incandescents failed ; completed that task in early 1995, leaving the house with a late-night,-all-rooms-in-use lighting drain of about 60W. I replaced less than one CFL per year until 2004 when I got married ; SWMBO was obeyed and the various fluorescents were replaced with incandescents (cost of fittings around £350, plus effort, plus around £50 for dimmer switches). Comparable lighting drain now is around 1000W (£~0.30/day), with 1-2 incandescents per month failing (~£3/month) .
FINALLY, SWMBO is seeing my point about lighting efficiency and I'm getting her to accept daylight-spectrum CFLs back into the house (with non-daylight-spectrum where appropriate), with some incandescent GU10s being replaced as they fail with GU10 LED packages in appropriate colours or blends of colours (some of the GU10 incandescents are on dimmers, which is a problem I'm still looking for a solution to). At current rates, it's going to take several years to halve the lighting drain, during which time lighting technologies will, no doubt, change availability and prices. Again.
I'm nagging the local independant lighting retailer to stock daylight-spectrum CFLs. They really do look different, and in these northern climes they make a huge difference to indoor plants through the winter (we don't have any south-facing windows, so 4 hours of oblique light through rain clouds might be all the natural light the plants get in a day). People with SAD also find them very helpful, I'm told. All good grounds for independent shops to stock them so they don't have to compete on price with the big chains.
Whoever said that lighting was easy?
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slashdot == 'knee jerk'
Indeed. And as I remodel a house that I hope to move into soon, this is exactly the sort of thing that has so far prevented me from installing general-purpose LED lighting. (The geek cave will have, of course, several arrays of high-efficiency red LEDs, which should last longer than I do. But that's not exactly general-purpose.)
I'd wager that your LED projects are driving the diodes at near peak current. With less current, the phosphor will obviously degrade more slowly.
I don't have details on the curves involved, but just to throw some numbers out: Suppose that a regular white LED sustains reasonably good color for about 2.5 years of use at peak rated current.
I'd be perfectly happy to buy a bunch of pre-fab 10W LED fixtures, with diodes driven at 1/4 of their rated current, and 10 years of life. But such a thing doesn't seem to exist -- longevity doesn't seem to enter the equation in a world dominated by lumens-per-dollar.
*sigh*
Kid-proof tablet..
Now, this is just anecdotal. Yet, in Lithuania and here in America (where we have a mobile home), and at my mother-in-law's (an older home), the typical lifetime that I get out of a CFL is about 2-6 months. After that, it either starts flickering, buzzing, and failing, or it just straight out fails.
Compare that to the claim of 7 years.
Now, considering the energy that goes into producing these things, I'd also argue that these things use more energy, not less.
If anyone knows a way to get a longer life out of them, please -- by all means -- point it out.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I'm an anti-mercury Nazi, and yet I use compact florescent bulbs in maybe 60% of the sockets in my home (mostly the non-dimmer sockets... also in a multi-bulb fixture I usually include one incandescent that actually lights when the switch is thrown instead of flickering to life later...)
On balance, I think the mercury in the bulbs is offset by the reduction in mercury laden coal burning at our local power plant - and as lame as the current waste handling stream is, I also believe that most of the mercury found in florescent bulbs in our home (compact and not - those 4' tubes in the garage likely contain more Hg than all the CFs put together) will find its way to the local landfill about 10 miles west of home, sure, about 1/2 of the bulbs will break in transit, but hopefully not too much will find its way back into our home and lungs. Mercury vapor should settle into the soil fairly quickly.
On the other hand, the power plant 4 miles north of home spews superheated coal byproducts high in the sky. I'm pretty sure I breathe a fair number of ppms of whatever the latest load of coal had in it all the time, at least when the wind is out of the North. Sure, they run scrubbers, except when they don't - and I've seen plenty of times where the scrubbers are off-line, but the power is still flowing.
Is the problem just CFLs? Or does the same issue apply to all the long fluorescent tubes that have been around for decades?
OT: Sorry for replying to this message rather than the story, but Slashdot's "reply to story" button seems to have vanished from me, though it could just be that I haven't finished my coffee yet.
The solubility of elemental mercury in pure water at room temperature is fairly low (~60 ppb) according to http://www.hgtech.com/Data/Hg%20Properties/Hg%20Water%20Solubility.htm
Thus, it would *only* take ~22 gallons (83.3 liters) of pure water to completely dissolve the 5 mg of elemental mercury.
Adding more elemental mercury (e.g., the wastes from two CFLs) to an already saturated liquid would not pose an additional problem (assuming the drop itself was not consumed).
It is the same situation as adding more sugar to a "sweet as can be" glass of tea. The excess sugar eventually settles to the bottom of the glass and doesn't add anything to the taste.
In non-lab conditions, the solubility of mercury will likely be slightly higher due to alternative reactions.
-todd
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Be yourself no matter what they say
The LED manufacturers will get hugely rich before they have replaced every incandescent in the world with LEDs; it will take over 20 years and by then they will be into a replacement cycle with their new, twice as efficient LEDs with a better spectrum. People will buy new LEDs to save money, no need to make the old ones wear out.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I was going to suggest that maybe miniaturizing metal halide lamps might be a solution. They are more efficient, but they contain even more mercury than fluorescents.
So instead, create tougher CFL bulbs to prevent accidental breakage, phase out, or otherwise make tougher the long fluorescent bulbs used in commercial and industrial settings, or use HID bulbs* more in those settings. All of which should be used in conjunction with a well designed recycling program.
*I suggest HID because while they may contain more mercury, they are generally packaged it a tougher and smaller bulb design. As a result, I believe they would benefit when used with a good recycling program. Plus they are energy efficient.
One problem is that there isn't enough education about the right way to dispose of CFs. I once attended a local environmental stage show for kids, where they gave out organic vegatables and CF lights. The guy running the show said "When these lights die, don't throw them in the garbage," but he didn't say the right way to dispose of them! The directions for proper disposal need to be as obvious and available as the stores that sell them.
Movies are filmed at 24fps (double flashed in theatres at 48Hz - but still just 24 frames/sec). This is generally not noticeable since the shutter speed is set during filming to blur each frame except in certain high-action scenes (Bourne comes to mind) where the producer wants the added anxiety produced by a high shutter speed, no blur, stark, high contrast scene.
NTSC is 60 half frames per second - a rate also considered the MINIMUM for a CRT monitor refresh rate. 60Hz CRT monitors gives me a headache. 60fps is not fast enough for certain things - for instance, watching downhill skiing. One half frame the skier is on the right half of the screen, the next, almost to the left side. For a split second it appears that there are 2 skiers, since the blob of darkness is not connected in the two frames, since the shutter speed is high and he is hurtling down the mountain at 150km/h. For this reason I am saddened that the HD spec didn't include a 120Hz rate, perhaps as a 720i 120Hz. Some TVs support 120Hz - though only through interpolation. I don't think there are any that accept 120Hz sources over HDMI, etc.
The 60Hz LCD refresh rate is different since, except for a very few "Gamer" LCDs, the screen does not go black between refreshes. In the Gamer LCDs, switching all the pixels off momentarily is supposed to reduce motion blur - I'm not sure how well this works since I have never seen it in person.
However all of those are steady state - head stationary, object stationary - rates.
When you get fast motion, and combine that with persistence of vision, things break down. Especially at night. Especially for red, bright red, on a field of darkness. Taillights. At 100Hz, you cannot see the LEDs blinking, but movies your head back and forth burns copies of the tail light into your retina, like mouse trails. Alternatively, if you are stationary on the side of the road, a passing car leaves a ramjet-esque punctuated string of red taillights in your vision. This is very distracting. If only one could rewire them to spell out words as you are driving by... Hmm...
I am still using all of the compact fluorescent bulbs I bought in college. In 1997.
I love the hype that by switching to CFL (I did cause they last longer and I am lazy) saves so much power. While yes it does save you power, you will not see the power plants reducing power generated.
When you have to heat your house, incandescent lights are
100% efficient. All the "waste" energy appears as heat
which you need any way. If you live in a place like
Canada or Sweden compact florescent bulbs are a loser.
Why not charge a $0.50 deposit, for the return of every broken mercury bulb?
If the deposit is high enough (and considers inflation over the lifetime of the bulb) -- far fewer people will simply throw these things away.
A deposit will also help incentive-ize the creation the infrastructure for people to redeem their deposit, either at the point-of-sale, a recycling center, or even an automated station in the center of town.
Got any links? I want something at least as broad spectrum as my little Verilux desk lamp.
Thanks!
Who cares if a led bulb will last 34 years. In 34 years the temps will rise more than 25 degrees and the seas will rise 3000 feet. Will these bulbs still work under water?
The compact flourescent thing has been a scam from the beginning. They want to replace a cheap technology for one that is poisonous. They were ignoring the mercury for years and now it's a new realization. That fraud Hillary wants to FORCE you to buy these awful contraptions for a few measly votes. All of it under the umbrella of environmentalism. We should let it happen just to see how damaging an awful environmentalist law can be to the environment. Do you really think households will stay true to a twelve step cleanup procedure when a bulb breaks?
Where's my sock? There it is...
I live in Saskatchewan, where we get down to -50 and below, sometimes, in the winter. I have CFL bulbs in my outdoor security lights (over the doors and so on), on a switch that automatically turns them on at dusk and off at dawn. When it gets really cold in the winter the outside lights sometimes take about ten or fifteen minutes to get going. They burn a sort of pale pink colour that doesn't really give any usable light until they get warmed up, but after the first fifteen minutes they provide almost as much light as they do in the summer.
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