As federal and state mandates for energy-efficient lighting take effect, tons of mercury is being released into the environment every year! Going green, in this case, is not green. Instead, going green has created an environmental nightmare. A fluorescent tube is filled with a gas containing low pressure mercury vapor, argon, xenon, neon, or krypton . A fluorescent tube contains12mg of mercury and a CFL bulb contains 4mg. An incandescent bulb has no mercury, but is rated at 10mg of mercury, because of the coal used to produce the energy. We hate data like this because they don’t add the mercury from the power plant to the total fluorescent bulb figures. We call this flawed data. You can read our article on flawed data here as an example.
Recycling, of CFLs and fluorescent tubes are also problematic because of how fragile the lamps are. How do you deal with a fragile toxic item waiting to be recycled in your home? It is impractical to run to a recycle center with one CFL or tube. The question then becomes; how do you store toxic CFLs and tubes until you go to a recycle center? You don’t want your children to get into these items so; what should you do? Keep them under lock and key in a padded container wrapping each bulb in bubble wrap? Not practical. To make recycling practical there needs to be an easy way to do it. When the recycling of household trash began it was a flop. People were not going to sort, wash, and place items in separate containers then drag them out to the street for collection. Only when people were given a recycle cart that they rolled out to the curb along with their regular garbage did recycling work. The same holds true for e-waste; it will not work very well until there is an easy and practical way to do it.
Finding a place that will take CFLs is hard; but finding a place that will take fluorescent tubes is even harder. You can find a list of recyclers here; or by phone at 1-800-253-2687. Your local home depot will take CFLs; but in our area, they will not take fluorescent tubes. At some point they have to go to a recycling center or waste management location. Do they carefully wrap and store them in special containers? Or are they thrown into a big heap of broken glass and toxins then dumped into landfills? The cost to carefully take each bulb apart in a controlled environment, with each component of the bulb being reused, including capturing and recycling of the gases would be astronomical. We have a bad feeling that a lot of recycled products get dumped into the landfills because of the cost involved to dispose of, and recycle them properly.
The use of LEDs and other technologies will help with the problem of mercury toxins in the home. A bigger problem is burning coal to produce electricity. If the mercury released to run a light bulb is 10 mg; what amount of mercury is released to run a city?
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