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GE Closes Last US Light Bulb Factory
pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the US is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison's innovations in the 1870s. What made the plant vulnerable is, in part, a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014 but rather than setting off a boom in the US manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas. GE developed a plan to see what it would take to retrofit a plant that makes traditional incandescents into one that makes CFLs but even with a $40 million investment the new plant's CFLs would have cost about 50 percent more than those from China. 'Everybody's jumping on the green bandwagon,' says Pat Doyle, 54, who has worked at the plant for 26 years. But 'we've been sold out. First sold out by the government. Then sold out by GE.'"
Yes, it sucks that the market for candles disappeared but you have to adapt and compete. If you can't make CFLs competitively, then you lose your job. It's that simple.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Ah, the good old US government, not only reducing US jobs but also reducing consumer choice in something as simple as choosing what type of light bulb you want.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
OK, how exactly were they "sold out by GE"?
The plant wasn't profitable currently, was going to be made obsolete by law in a couple of years, and was not even remotely profitable to refit to producing the CFLs.
So they should just pay people to work for the heck of it?
It's easy for stuff to be 50% less in a factory town where works are just meat and they work super overtime with no overtime pay. Also over seas it costs less to pay off / bribe gov into looking the other way over them breaking over time and worker rights laws.
GE is looking out for themselves. Making light bulbs overseas is cheaper, so they do it without one bit of shame. Which is fine, they're a corporation, their duty is to their shareholders. If their shareholders want profits, they have to do it cheaper.
The US government has duties to the citizens. Unfortunately this can put some citizens out of sorts, because the needs of the whole may be different. Sorry, but it happened with the buggy whip makers, it'll happen with the light bulb ones.
Hopefully these employees are getting retraining, education, and whatever other resources they need to find jobs. You can certainly differ over whether or not the restrictions of light bulbs are appropriate, but we can't just throw our hands up and do nothing. If you have better ideas, please give them instead of just offering criticism.
I would rather hear dumb ideas than just hearing that you think all ideas are dumb.
In the manufacture of physical things it's very hard to compete with companies operating in other countries that have less worker protections, less environmental protections, and non-existent employee benefits.
Either we stop buying from manufacturers located in these countries or we push our legislators to prohibit the import of items manufactured under these conditions.
OR
We lower our standard of living to a 3rd world standard to "compete". Is throwing away your standard of living worth cheap light bulbs?
-ted
Agreed! It's only a matter of time before they phase out CFL bulbs because of their mercury content. That leaves LEDs as the next big thing.
"It's easy for stuff to be 50% less in a factory town where works are just meat and they work super overtime with no overtime pay. "
The reality of competing with cheap workers will require a reset so our workers become cheap. Productivity is high with few workers, but if more workers are to have jobs, they will have to work for less, live less well, and be like the rest of the world.
The main reason the US did so well for so long was it was the "last country standing" after WWII, which was the best thing ever to happen to the US economy.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison's innovations in the 1870s.
In other news GE has sold their buggy whip division...
This is not sad news except maybe for the employees who work there. Incandescent bulbs are a technology which has seen its day but it's day is pretty much at an end. They'll continue to be manufactured for some time but not by GE. Anyone who would expect GE to continue to manufacture an obsolete product with rapidly dwindling market share is a moron. The growth opportunities in lighting are with newer technology such as CFL and LED lighting. This is not something to shed a single tear over. Sentimentality in a situation like this is just bizarre.
I find that CFLs last exactly as long as they state on the package which is pretty damn good. I am surprised by how much I like them and how much cooler they run.
The biggest downside is I just throw the burnt out ones in the trash (with batteries) like many others do. So I do wonder if all that mercury will actually make the "green" aspect just another bunch of bullshit.
I suspect for this reason alone, the future will not be in CFLs.
Just efficiency levels. You can choose any technology that meets that efficiency standard.
When energy costs and availability affect our way of life and security so much, using a statism to attack a move as logical as this just doesn't make sense.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
As mentioned in the article it costs 50% more to make them locally. Personally I don't think that 1st world economies should have to compete against 3rd world labor laws, non existent environmental standards, and be forced to collude with the government to get subsidies and manipulate the currency exchange just to be competitive. So until things change for the better, no we shouldn't encourage more jobs to go overseas by legislating light bulb usage.
Ah, the good old US government, not only reducing US jobs but also reducing consumer choice in something as simple as choosing what type of light bulb you want.
Because god damn it I should have a RIGHT to burn as much energy unnecessarily as I want. I have a RIGHT to be an irresponsible, planet destroying, jackass who clings to obsolete and inefficient technologies. How DARE the government force me to utilize a less polluting, longer lasting technology. [/sarcasm]
Choice has costs that go much beyond your consumption preferences. I like old cars but there are reasons modern cars have modern pollution controls. If you can't behave responsibly, eventually others are going to get annoyed at your selfish behavior and you might not like their solution. Incandescent bulbs consume more power than available substitutes and that has national energy policy implications that are much more serious than your annoyance that you have to use a different type of light bulb.
And LEDs don't require you to use a hazmat suit to pick up pieces if you break one (since they contain Mercury).
Urban legend. Light fingered
So that's 1/5th of all the energy used in residences.
That's not minuscule.
Your last argument is ridiculous. Every bit counts, just because one thing isn't done doesn't mean another thing done isn't useful.
And by they way they ARE mandating better fuel standards. The CAFE (required fuel economy average of cars sold) goes up 2.5mpg next year (first raise in a decade) and will go up another 4.8mpg over the next 8 years.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I think a ban is a horrible choice. Why not just add a tax on them?
That way, anyone who had some reason for wanting one could still get one - and who knows why you might want one (art/aesthetics? heat (especially in odd/cold installation environments)? plain old preference (I mean, it's not like there isn't much worse environmental choices that aren't banned)?).
Use the tax on some environmental endeavor, and set it high enough that the net outcome is environmentally positive.
There wouldn't need to be as many produced, but production could slow over time rather than stopping immediately.
Everybody wins.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I wish some Westinghouse award winner would say "In the name of Nicolai Tesla, I say shove it up your ass! I don't accept awards from a company started by a thief."
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
They get broken about 10% of the time when a bulb is being changed
Do you have Parkinson's disease or something?
In 3 to 5 years when all the CFLs start dying, there will be a huge furor over the mercury they contain leeching into landfills.
So this can cut energy usage in the US by about 1.75%.
And you say it doesn't count? That's a lot of energy.
Passenger cars use about 14% of the energy in the US. You would like to increase fuel economy average in cars 5mpg. This would reduce that energy use about 15% (5mpg out of 32mpg). That's an energy reduction of 2.2%.
So you ridicule one mandate as trivially small and suggest one that is only 25% larger as the real answer? Especially when the lighting one can be much more easily implemented as it is much easier and cheaper to replace light bulbs than to replace your car.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Not to mention producers will have to lower prices to reduce the cost of living for those workers. That will inevitably happen anyway as the corporations economically devastate their own market for the sake of short term returns. Unemployed people don't buy much.
The Cree MCE can push 1000 lumens with about 10W of power. There are other LEDs as well (SSC P7, SST-90) that can output this sort of lumen count. However there are no standard type bulbs that feature it, as the problem with LEDs is that they dissipate the heat into the fixture rather than radiate it forward. This means that the fire hazard is an issue, unless your roof is made of fireproof material. Radiating heat into the room is a non issue, as rooms are usually large enough that this is not an issue. A small area just behind the light getting very very hot, however, is an issue.
For this reason I think that the LED problem is simply one of designing fixtures where the heat sink is designed such that the surface that the LED is mounted on has significant surface area facing the same direction as the LED. This may mean complex designs, but light fittings are already complex because interior designers are a bunch of loonies. Now they'll actually have a reason to make that room lamp look like a gigantic vagina.
I hate printers.
Actually what needs to happen for America to stay competitive with China is for an oppressive fascist authoritarian government to seize power and subsequently squelch all dissent as party loyalist pillage the country. Then we would be apples to apples the same as China and that future doesn't seem to be too far off.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
The mercury released from a CFLs deposited in a landfill if they aren't recycled is, with the current electricity generating mix in the US, less than the average quantity of mercury released into the environment from electricity generation (burning coal) to supply the additional energy consumed to power incandescent bulbs over CFLs. (Source)
Why? Because you want more mercury released into the environment?
FWIW, I think thermostat threshholds aren't actually entirely ridiculous. For residential usage I imagine there'd be a backlash, but there's no reason so many square feet of office space have to be a/c'd to 72 or even 70 constantly.
For home energy usage, though, why micromanage what I do within my energy budget, so long as my total energy usage is quite low? I personally hate CFLs for reading, and I don't think my three total incandescent bulbs (225W total when all on) are really killing the environment. That's why I think just going by total usage is more fair. If my neighbor wants to run a ridiculous thermostat and television, and I don't, why can't I use my energy savings on something I prefer? My whole apartment probably uses less than 50% of the average energy around here, so I'd pass any actually objective threshholds anyone chose to impose.
But with this per-item efficiency thing, I can't run 225W of incandescent bulbs, but my neighbor can run 2000W of home-theater equipment? How is that fair or pro-environment?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It is also all in the name of "being green", but how much more polluting are the overseas factories, and the cargo transports to get all those bulbs back over to the U.S.?
it will be won without a single shot as the usa wont be making anything .....
You call storing them until you go to buy more and then having to remember to take them with you easy. It may not be hard, bit it is a hassle. Most people will just throw them in the trash.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Incandescent lights are probably more expensive to ship. They take up as much space as CFLs but are much cheaper, so the shipping cost makes up for a larger part in total cost.
Any adult working a minimum wage job in the US qualifies for public assistance in a variety of ways. Employers who pay this wage are effectively being subsidized by the government.
There is no benefit to the US economy to have subsidized businesses operating in its economy. And subsidized low wage employees are a disincentive to capital investment to improve the productivity of workers, which is ultimately a drag on the economy.
China's low wages, effectively managed by excessively low Yuan valuation are a big disincentive to modernization there. Eventually I am sure that China will realize that mercantilism on the scale they are attempting won't work - you can't drag 1.3 billion people to modern consumer lifestyles by selling cheap light bulbs to a country with a population of 300 million.
We just don't need that many light bulbs.
And building an economic model based on sub min wage workers who are government subsidized so they won't starve is flat out stupid.
That site is a little over the top, don't you think? For example:
Before Cleanup: Air Out the Room
Ok, the CFL save some energy, but they sure add more pollutants
Nonsense. I put a CFL light over my front porch stairs 8 years ago, and it still works fine despite being exposed outdoor temperature extremes. It's been on an average of 6 hours per day, saving 45W over the equivalent incandescent bulb. That adds up to a savings of 790kWh (2800MJ). Since it typically takes about 3 joules of thermal energy in a coal plant to deliver 1 joule of electricity to the consumer, that corresponds to 8500MJ, or almost 1000 pounds of coal saved by this single light bulb.
What would you rather have: a few grams of plastic and chemicals sealed in a landfill, or 1/2 ton of CO2, sulfur and other pollutants in the air you breath?
What is the cost, in MJ, of the recycling of the CFL bulbs vs simple disposal of the incandescent bulbs? What is the environmental cost of the increased mercury being added to our landfills (for those who don't properly recycle)?
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
If you don't like bluish CFLs, get yellowish ones. There are 3 colors, one is very yellow.
Hmm, the thing is, all of the "yellow" CFLs I've seen haven't been a very good replacement for incandescents -- the yellow seemed "sickly and weird" rather than "warm" like incandescents.
I dunno, maybe they'll eventually come up with phosphor formulations that are more pleasant, but until they do, I rather like my incandescent lamp (only one, and only 60w, but it's so nice and relaxing...).
We live, as we dream -- alone....
BTW LED lighting is my job so prepare for a MASSIVE smackdown if you wanna go toe to toe.
Sensitive much, methinks. Therefore, I conclude that either A) You are really an idiot with just enough knowledge to think he's "in", or B) You are really somebody I don't want to know too well.
In either event, I'm guessing that you probably don't get invited to many parties.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Congratulations, you win the Taco Award for the post with the most replies deserving a 'Whoosh!'.
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lgw's law: you cannot make a comment criticizing spelling or grammar on the internet without that complaint post also containing a spelling or grammar mistake. This applies even when criticizing your own posts, of course. Also, as we say here: your an idiot.
Only some of us say "your an idiot". The rest of us say you're and idiot.