Seven Things You Don't Know

[aps45819]

Found a good article about the mercury in CFL's.

What does it say about 100,000 bulbs in a land fill contaminating the water?

 

[nebeno]

At 4mg of mercury average per bulb, 100,000 bulbs would contain about 14oz of mercury. Much of that would go into the air and disperse before coming back to the land or water in much smaller amounts spread across a much larger area. Just the mineable reserves of mercury world wide is 800,000 tonnes, this doesn't include the enormous amount of naturally existing mercury in the earth and seas. Considering this, I don't think the landfill scenario is of any great danger. The greatest risk from CFL's seems to be if perhaps one broke in an enclosed space and you breathed in the majority of the vapors. That's my take on it. I don't like mercury any more than anyone else, but I think there are far worse problems from plastics and car exhaust and a myriad of other things.

Mercury is a compound that can be found naturally in the environment. It can be found in metal form, as mercury salts or as organic mercury compounds.

Mercury enters the environment as a result of normal breakdown of minerals in rocks and soil through exposure to wind and water. Release of mercury from natural sources has remained fairly the same over the years. Still mercury concentrations in the environment are increasing; this is ascribed to human activity.
Most of the mercury released from human activities is released into air, through fossil fuel combustion, mining, smelting and solid waste combustion. Some forms of human activity release mercury directly into soil or water, for instance the application of agricultural fertilizers and industrial wastewater disposal. All mercury that is released in the environment will eventually end up in soils or surface waters.

 

[Baja28]

What does it say about 100,000 bulbs in a land fill contaminating the water?

Show me a landfill anywhere with 100,000 fluorescent bulbs. I'll wait.

 

[Artemis]

This is a very interesting conversation. It has made me do some research. We have been using CFLs for several years now and we are quite familiar with all the faults. We are also pleased with the progress and improvements of CFLs. They have made several improvements in size and function. Mention was made in this thread and in another thread about waiting for the lights to warm up. There are now "instand on" CFLs. You don't have to wait anymore. There are also dimmable CFLs and 3 ways. Someone also mentioned that their bulbs do not last as long as stated on the packaging and with some brands we have also noticed this. We no longer purchase any of the cheaper bulbs such as come in a contractors pack or ones that are the cheapest price. These usually fail in a short amount of time. We have had very few problems with any of the mid to high priced bulbs. Some we have had for years and years. It is important to use the bulb as it was intented. For example, regular CFLs should not be used in a can light, get the ones designed for can lights. I emailed SMECO to find some information and the wonderful woman who helped me gave me these links.

http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/promotions/change_light/downloads/Fact_Sheet_Mercury.pdf

Environmental Info

Since we get half of our electrical energy from (cough cough) "Clean" coal, that means we are putting ALOT of pollutants into the air, mercury included. So reducing your electrical load in any way possible is putting less pollutants into the environment. By continuing to use incandescent bulbs, which waste 80% of their energy as heat and use a SIGNIFICANT amount of energy, we are putting more mercury into the environment than if we simply broke all the CFLs and threw them into the landfill.

Our family has started the transition to LEDs. Once a CFL burns out, we will replace it with an LED. That doesn't happen often so it will probably take awhile........The cost will be spread over several years and by then, LEDs should become less expensive.

 

[nebeno]

Great info Artemis! Thanks for sharing. I hadn't thought of the mercury output of power stations as compared to mercury from CFL's.

 

[nebeno]

I started crunching the numbers on this, but then found this site:

CFL vs. incandescent: Battle of the bulb | MNN - Mother Nature Network

States that total mercury for cfl is 1.6mg (1.2 from coal plant, .4 from bulb itself). By comparison, an incandescent bulb results in 5.8mg from the coal plant. Of course if your power is from something other than coal, then the results would be .4mg vs. .0mg. But as coal plants produce so much of our electricity, if everyone went to cfl's, even with the mercury in landfills, it would still result in vastly less mercury going into our water and air than incandescent.