Compact fluorescent lamps are a bad idea on many levels, not least of which is the small amount of mercury present in every lamp.
Greens and governments pretend CFL’s are a good idea because they lower energy use, even though clean-up procedures for a broken lamp read like a do-it-yourself Fukushima hazard.
But as more people use CFL’s, many more dead curly lamps are headed to the landfill, and someone noticed there might be a problem:
Demand for the bulbs is growing as federal and state mandates for energy-efficient lighting take effect, yet only about 2 percent of residential consumers and one-third of businesses recycle them, according to the Association of Lighting and Mercury Recyclers. “If the recycling rate remains as abysmally low as it is, then there will certainly be more mercury released into the environment,” said Paul Abernathy, executive director of the Napa-based recycling association. “Until the public really has some kind of convenient way to take them back, it’s going to be an issue.”
The problem is owned by hippies and the greenwashing governments that accepted the green propaganda without so much as a nod at due diligence. How much of a problem is mercury in landfills? A big one:
As a result of discarded fluorescent lights, including CFLs, U.S. landfills release into the atmosphere and in stormwater runoff upward of 4 tons of mercury annually, according to a study in the Journal of the Air and Waste Management Association.
Regular readers may recall that Canada recently banned most mercury products to avoid 4.5 metric tonnes of mercury in landfills. Now we can see that effort is more than offset by the increasing numbers of CFL’s headed to landfills. People won’t recycle the curly menaces because it’s easier to toss them away, just as they’ve done forever when an incandescent light bulb fails.
Canadian, American, UK and all governments that banned future use of incandescent light bulbs have a problem - if they make too much noise about the dangers of mercury in landfills, they risk people asking why they made the alternatives illegal.
It’s a fair question and it’s one they can’t answer honestly. If they did, CFL’s would be consigned to the trash heap of bad green ideas and we’d get the Edison’s trusty invention back into our homes.
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I agree on your points, but there’s one you need to add. Apparently there has been, and is, strong lobbying by the manufacturers of CFLs (GE, others) to have CFLs become the dominant bulb. There’s a lot more money in CFLs than the others and if they are the only product that’s available then someone will cash in.
LEDs are nice, except that they have their hazardous waste issues, too. Maybe not as bad as Mercury, but still there.
“In the mean time consumers need to be educated on recycling CFLs.”
In the real meantime you need your worthless totalitarian arse kicked.
Ecks, it’s not “they should be recycled” as much as “they are a Class 6 Hazardous Wate”. Industrial applications have known all about this for decades because we were forced to ship them at in drums labeled as such and spend a fortune disposing of them.
[...] When green ideas attack [...]
Mail your dead CFLs to David Suzuki! Or your MP…no postage required for that.
DON’T mark it Fragile.
Use a non-existent return address.
Or accidently (on purpose) drop one in your MP’s constituency office, twice!
Let them do the “we’re all gonna die” cleanup, which takes 2 hours or more.
I agree LEDs have potential but there is no free lunch. There are hazardous biproducts in the manufacture and disposal of them. Also using them for traffic lights has been a big energy saver BUT when the snow blows the lights do not create any heat and you can’t see what light is active. I witnessed several accidents this year with the LED traffic lights being a contributing factor.
More attention needs to be paid to improving LED lighting solutions. In the mean time consumers need to be educated on recycling CFLs.
I live in Canada and regularly recycle however when I go to my regular drop-off site I can find areas for tin cans, cardboard, paper, and plastic but nothing for bulbs like this. I was not even aware that CFLs should be recycled until I read this article and as a result a couple other ones.
A problem is that the Canadian government, and I assume others as well, would rather ignore or deny issues with past decisions as they might help fuel opposing parties election campaigns.