Plain Dealer: The Dark Side of Energy-Efficient Light Bulbs
Filed under: Earth 911 - May 4, 2007
Michael Scott, Plain Dealer Reporter
Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
May 4, 2007 Friday
Mercury in CFLs raises concerns
That bright, white light cast from increasingly popular fluorescent bulbs also throws a surprisingly dim environmental shadow.
So today, Ohio Environmental Protection Agency officials will meet with local solid waste district leaders to push their new plan to keep fluorescent bulbs out of landfills.
Their concern: up to 40 milligrams of toxic mercury found in each of tens of thousands of fluorescent tubes thrown away by Ohio business and industry. Mercury, the catalyst that makes the bulbs glow, is also a neurotoxin linked to brain, liver and kidney damage.
But the environmental apprehension doesn’t end there: There’s also some mercury in the newer, smaller compact fluorescent lights.
CFLs – those usually swirly-topped, screw-in bulbs that sell for as much as $14 but promise a lifespan of four years or more – are a hot environmental commodity.
They’re promoted by environmental groups as a way to reduce pollution and by retail giants like Wal-Mart, which has said it hopes to sell 100 million CFLs this year.
In fact, the highly efficient fluorescents remain highly recommended by the U.S. Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency over electricity-draining incandescents.
But mercury concerns are rising.
Although an individual CFL may contain as little as 4 milligrams of mercury – one-tenth of the amount in the commercial-length tubes – there are a lot of them out there.
Compact fluorescents were introduced to the United States in 1989 but already make up about 7 percent of the market, with millions a year coming from China alone.
That bugs Cleveland artist and activist Ray Tapajna.
“Once I found out about the mercury and that 90 percent are made in China – and who knows what kind of pollution controls are in place over there? – I opposed them,” Tapajna said.
State and county officials said millions of the mercury bulbs someday landing in landfills would pose a serious problem but that collection and recycling efforts are coming along.
“It’s on everybody’s radar screen,” said Cuyahoga County Solid Waste Director Pat Holland. “Even though right now we’re worrying more about six-footers from businesses than smaller bulbs from individuals.”
EPA officials today will encourage waste-district leaders to provide better ways for fluorescent users to recycle.
“Right now we’re trying to get trade associations to be aware of the hazards,” said Helen Miller of the EPA’s Division of Solid Waste. “The volume used by households is not there yet, but it could be someday.”
For now, Holland said, a homeowner who tosses a CFL in the trash doesn’t even face a fine.
At the same time, consumers are warned not to breathe the dust from a broken fluorescent because of the mercury.
The EPA recommends cleaning up a broken CFL with a broom or wet cloth – not a vacuum – and placing the broken bulb in a plastic bag before disposing of it.
Officials at TCP Inc., an Aurora company that manufactures the compact units, recommends Internet sites earth911.org or lamprecycle.org to locate the nearest recycling center. Consumers can also call 1-800-CLEAN-UP.
Holland said the Cuyahoga district will accept the CFLs at a May 12 collection and other Northeast Ohio counties also have at least one collection day each year.
Lorain County Solid Waste District Director Dan Billman said residents fill a semitrailer truck with fluorescents every few months. The district has collected 87,000 bulbs since March 2005.
“We’re probably the most aggressive county in the state, and I think we’ve shown that there are a lot of fluorescents out there,” said Billman.
The rise of the CFL – and the environmental concerns – have not gone unnoticed by other bulb manufacturers.
Royal Phillips Electronics earlier this year rolled out new CFLs with an industry-low mercury content below 2 mg. General Electric, meanwhile, has said that by 2010 it will offer incandescent bulbs twice as efficient as those sold today and four times as efficient by 2012.
Even with concerns that CFLs are mostly manufactured overseas, that they sometimes don’t meet longevity claims, that many won’t work with a dimmer switch and that some still emit a cool, bluish light, the bulbs still are promoted heavily by environmental groups.
“We’re very gung-ho for CFLs,” said Jack Shaner of the Ohio Environmental Council. “We want people to keep on buying them and using them and learn about safe disposal practices.”
Shaner and others argue that using CFLs prevents more mercury from being released into the air by power plants because they are more efficient.
A power plant emits about 10 mg of mercury to produce the electricity needed to run an incandescent bulb, compared with only 2.4 mg of mercury to run a CFL for the same amount of time.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: mscott@plaind.com, 440-602-4780
3 Responses to “Plain Dealer: The Dark Side of Energy-Efficient Light Bulbs”
From Cleveland Plain Dealer Letters May 13, 2007
ENERGY-SAVING LIGHT BULBS? WELL, NOT EXACTLY
By Ray Tapajna
Michael Scott gave us an excellent report about the mercury contamination related to the use of CFL energy saving light bulbs (May 4). However, there’s more to it than this alone. Home Depot, on Earth Day, gave a milion of them away free, saying it was like taking 70,000 autos off the highway in terms of pollution. ( If Globalization and Free Trade are a success – what will the world do with 200 million more autos in China and India?)
THE 8000 MILES LIGHT BULB
Home Depot and Wal-Mart, which also promotes these bulbs, do not tell us how far one of the CFL light bulbs has to travel to get here. Ninety percent are made in China. This means a single CFL light bulb travels about 8,000 miles to get to the United States. We are not told how much energy is exhausted in terms of protective packaging, long-haul ocean shipping and truck and rail energy used in getting just one light bulb here.
On top of this, we do not know the exent of “dirty” manufacturing involved in China. Manufacturing these bulbs includes the use of coal, which produced mercury pollutants. There are no walls up to the sky protecting us from this pollution.
We should also note that the money spent by consumers for this product, like many others made in China and other foreign places, goes directly to the manufacturers in China to boost their economy and not ours. (The IUE-CWA union had a big ad in the Cleveland Plain Dealer May 10, 2007 titled Green Technology shouldn’t mean a pink slip for American Workers. – the ad ends adding – Go to ScrewThatBulb.org to sign our petition and tell GE to invest in American Jobs.)
Finally, the China Ocean Shipping Co. brings products like this across our country on railroad flat cars containing large shipping containers. COSCO is owned in part by the Chinese Liberation Army. ( These containers present another problem since the U.S. does not ship much back to China and the empty containers are a storage problem too – where do they go and how far do they have to travel to get there?)
Ponder all of this while you think you are saving energy using these bulbs. Someone should ask the dysfunctional globalist free-traders like Al Gore about things like this.
Ray Tapajna
Cleveland Ohio
See Tapart News and Art that Talks at http://tapsearch.com/tapartnews and Explore the lost worlds in the Flat World of Globalist Free Traders like Thomas Friedman from the New York Times and the Clintons from the Land of is at http://tapsearch.com/flatworld/
See also We chopped up the Golden Goose that layed the Golden Eggs. Who said we had to compete like this at http://ezinearticles.com/?id=541566
and other related articles at http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Ray_Tapajna and rss feed http://ezinearticles.com/members/rss/Ray-Tapajna.xml
A popular article is Lend Lease Act was real Free Trade and not chopped liver as in the Globalist world.
Just say no to all things made in china and don’t shop wal-mart
I want to send them my disapproval of firing U S workers!