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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?
Simple. Mercury in CFL < mercury which would be released to produce (incandescent - CFL) energy.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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.
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 smash one bulb then that is not too much of a hazard. However, if you broke five bulbs in a small unventilated room then you might be in short term danger."
Like when a heavy bag of groceries smashes an entire box of new CFL's in the backseat of the car while making a sudden stop? Good thing that can never happen...
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
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.
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.
It's not a matter of two wrongs, it's a matter of tradeoffs (as with most things). I'm a big fan of non-coal power (including nuclear), but the existing coal plants aren't going to go away any time soon, and we seem to keep building more around the world.
For most people, artificial light is a necessity. These days, they have a choice between incandescents, CFLs/fluorescents, halogen, and maybe a few LED options. CFLs are much more efficient than incandescents or halogens. LED lights are still somewhat expensive. If you use a CFL, don't recycle it, and its total mercury emissions are less than the emissions from the power plants used to produce the extra electricity required to power an incandescent, it's clearly better to go with the CFL.
Of course, the best thing to do from an environmental perspective is to simply recycle your bulbs. I've mentioned this before on
Being a rational environmentally-conscious person means that you should take actions which require the least expense (in terms of both time and money) which cause energy/pollution reductions in the greatest quantity. That's why Blackle is a total waste of time (500,000 watt hours saved over all of its users? We're talking $50 in electricity at $0.10/kWH...).
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
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!
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
And that is why CFLs are packaged in those PITA clear blister packs. I'm sure they break during shipping and stocking as well and the repeated exposure to workers would be a big problem if the bulbs weren't in sealed packaging.
The LED industry is doing quite well at the moment. I've never had an LED fail yet, but I keep buying new devices with LEDs in them. In future, I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes normal for lamps come with LEDs built in, which you replace by replacing the entire lamp - if they last a decade or two then your taste in light fittings will probably change before the LEDs burn out. There might be a bubble as everyone converts to LEDs, but gradually production will settle down around replacement rate.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
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).
Would people be far more comfortable building more coal-plants if everyone switched to CFBs to light their homes?
The general idea is that a CFL/CFB uses about 5 times less power for it's light output, thus if everybody switched we wouldn't HAVE to build and operate more coal power plants, preventing the emission of said mercury. The small amount of mercury in a CFL has some people over reacting. Look up the reasons for 'mad as a hatter' to get an idea of how massive our exposure and dumping of it used to be.
If anything, all I'd call for is beefing up the bulb coatings to save the bulb from bursting on the occasional drop.
I wouldn't worry about it as much if we were looking at building more nuclear(more hydro isn't an option in my area), but the NIMBYs have shut that down.
So, instead, I practice shutting off lights in rooms that I'm not in, adjusting my heat during the night and when I'm not at home, and shutting off my computer when I'm not using it. Imagine the change to the electric bill then.
I do this as well. But I still need light, so why NOT go with power saving longer lasting CFLs than incandescents?
Personally, I've had such good luck with CFLs that I love them because once I put one in I don't have to replace it.
I don't read AC A human right
In response to your sig:
I can't speak for the other people who "mod-stalk" you, but I was one of the people who tried to help you with Ubuntu way back in the beginning and you have been shitting on my efforts for years now. In response, each time I get mod points (about once a week), I swing by to give you one of them. I lost interest for a while, especially since you seemed to have outgrown the trolling, but then you made that journal entry.
If you want to keep your username and UID (for what little they are worth, but the name is pretty famous, could sell it if you get your karma up), I would like an apology to the entire Ubuntu community. A sincere apology in a journal entry and linked to in your sig. I would like you to recognize that your difficulties with Ubuntu, while real, were mostly related to your overestimation of your own abilities which led you to fail to take the proper precautions. Your failure to do this was not the fault of some fictitious Canonical marketing machine. I would like you to admit that while Ubuntu did not work out for you, it does work for many people.
Like I said, I can't speak for the other enemies that you have made, but I suspect their reasons are similar to mine and that these measures would satisfy them as well.
You were rude and obnoxious to people who were trying to help you do something that most people find trivially easy.
You couldn't handle it and you got upset - that's OK, it happens, but you will have to accept that you caused a fair amount of ill will to be directed towards you.
As far as I can see, you can either accept the consequences of your behaviour or say "to hell with it" and create a new UID.
Complaining about it isn't going to help.