Balancing Environmental Impact – Household Lighting
During the life cycle of any product, the mining of the raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, storage, use, and ultimately disposal, have an effect on our environment. To determine the overall effect, an environmental life cycle assessment is used. Several environmental life cycle assessments on products are frequently debated, such as coffee cups, shopping bags, diapers and now electric lamps.
When selecting between compact fluorescent lamps (CFL), incandescent light bulbs and light emitting diode (LED) lighting, you have to look at the whole picture, from the cradle to the grave. In a simple environmental assessment, LED lighting is the hands-down winner, but they are still quite expensive. So for now, the discussion is usually between CFL and incandescent.
Manufacturing
While it takes about five times the energy to produce a CFL as compared to incandescent lamps, that still represents less manufacturing energy overall because six to 10 times as many incandescent lamps have to be produced to last as long as a single CFL.
Use
During the life of a CFL, it will use about four times less energy than a six to 10 standard incandescent bulbs used in that same period. That means that incandescent lamps, that have no mercury contained within, will cause hundreds of milligrams more power plant mercury emissions. The extra power used will also generate about 200 pounds of greenhouse gases.
Disposal
Fluorescent lamps contain mercury, and most mercury finds its way into our food and our water by rain washing it out of the sky. The mercury contained in one standard fluorescent lamp will contaminate 6000 gallons of water beyond safe drinking levels. Even low-mercury lamps (there is no such thing as a mercury free fluorescent lamp) will contaminate more than 1000 gallons of water beyond safe levels.
All types of fluorescent lamps should never be broken or thrown in the trash. They should be recycled by taking them to a local household hazardous waste collection program, commercial recycling company or retail take-back program.
Both fluorescent and incandescent lamps may have lead components to solder the connections at the base, in the glass, and in the inside phosphor coating. At present, incandescent lamps under federal law can be disposed in the trash. However limited, there are opportunities to recycle incandescent lamps. If no recycling opportunity exists in your area, check with your local household hazardous waste (HHW) collection program to see if they accept them.
General Electric has plans for a new high-efficiency incandescent lamp to be available by 2010 that will be four times as efficient as today’s 125-year-old technology. That would mean that during the lifetime of the lamp that it would use about the same electricity as a fluorescent lamp, it contains much less lead than older incandescent lamps and no mercury.
More Resources:
Mercury in CFLs – NPR News
Energy Efficient Lighting – Eartheasy
EPA Fact Sheet
One more view
vipr1ab
posted on June 7th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
As I age, I am becoming more mindful of how much waste I and my family generate. Any time I dispose of something, I imagine all 300+ million other Americans disposing of the same thing. Unfortunately, I am increasingly frustrated by how difficult is it to recycle. I want to recycle more, but even after searching the Web for more than an hour on how to recycle CFLs, I came away without any clear answers. I believe that the companies that produce and sell recyclable products should be making a concerted effort to make recycling easier for the consumers who use their products.
wireman
posted on June 10th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
vipr1ab, I share your frustration. I heard that IKEA’s take CFL bulbs back for recycling. I don’t know about FL tubes.
I wonder if household toxics collections would accept FL and CFL bulbs/tubes on a scale of a whole neighborhood, as in 100-200 units per 6 months, from a single neighborhood recycling organizer?
Balancing economies of scale and keeping dishonest commercial freeloaders out of the residential recycling program is difficult, though. Then again, if the mercury from a single bulb contaminates 6000 gallons of water beyond potability standards, I’m willing to pay for the devil himself to recycle his bulbs.
PS: everyone switch to T8’s — they have 1/2 the mercury of T12’s.
And it’s not just evil corporations that do wrong. Even the US Postal Service’s FL tubes sometimes wind up in a dumpster, rather than being recycled. There’s a lot of education work to be done.
briw
posted on June 11th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Hi,
Yes, all US IKEA locations accept CFLs for recycling (free), and have been doing so since 2001. They do not accept FL tubes (I wish they did, as my entire basement is FL tubes and I haven’t been able to find a place to recycle them in small quantities).
See a press release about it on the CFL-blog at http://www.cfl-blog.com/archives/11-guid.html
As far as I know, IKEA is the only national retailer (so far) that offers CFL recycling.
IKEA locations can be found online at http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/ikny_splash.html
Full disclosure: I do work for IKEA, but not in a PR role.
Bob Peeples, PE
posted on June 13th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Thanks for the info, briw. It is difficult in some areas to dispose of fluorescent lamps. We work with IKEA here, and we love that they are doing that. They provided our locator system with all of their store locations. You can find them, along with household hazardous waste facilities and events that may be near you, and any other facilities that are accepting CFL/FL, in the locator box at the top of this page.
Note: If you live in California, all Wal-Mart stores will be working with the California Take-It-Back Partnership accepting fluorescent lamps from customers for no charge during a one-day event on June 23.
Bob Peeples, PE
posted on June 13th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
wireman,
I worked as an environmental engineer for USPS from 1994-2000 and set up the universal waste program for the western US. If you ever see fluorescent lamps in the trash at any Postal Service location, call 1-800-ASK-USPS and let them know. While it is possible that these were low-mercury T-8 lamps, and not covered under the Universal Waste Rule as hazardous waste lamps, it is not USPS policy to put lamps in the trash.
spiercy
posted on June 20th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
What I’d like to see is government policy drastically change on recycling. Our entire national policy on recycling is based on a very bad EPA investigation in 87, with 90% politics, 10% rhetoric, and 0% environmental science. It’s led to the current “feel good” but “utter waste of time” policies we have today.
Here at our local recycling center they have no program to cope with truly dangerous items like FL’s, CFL’s, non ROHS compliant electronics, batteries, etc…. The overwhelming amount of recycling efforts focus on …..things that aren’t an environmental impact, or have a minimal one. If the government is going to take billions of our tax dollars to subsidize the unprofitable recycling industry, then focus on items that should be recycled. The impact of paper recycling? Worse than not recycling. The impact of plastic recycling? Pretty much moot.
Aluminum? A good idea….and about the only one.
The rest? Backed up by sensationalism, green-speak, “feel good” politics, and bad science.
The money spent on recycling should be spent on common disposable items that have a truly negative environmental impact. Batteries… CFL’s…Non ROHS compliant electronics.
Throw the rest into landfills until there are real impacts and until technology improves enough to make recycling as it exists more than just a pointless money pit.
vipr1ab
posted on July 3rd, 2007 at 11:53 am
wireman, briw, this is great news. Unfortunately, the nearest IKEA is 61 miles away :(. But it’s nice to know someone is stepping up. Perhaps others will follow.
Another one of my concerns is the lack of a recycling plan for household batteries and electronics–something spiercy mentioned. I have a large coffee can full of old batteries and, until recently, I didn’t know what to do with them. I have heard that Batteries Plus and all Walgreens will take them, although I haven’t verified this.
An idea I have for battery recycling is to require battery manufacturers to use packaging that can be reused to ship the used batteries back to a central recycling facility, postage paid. We’d pay extra up front for the postage, but I’d be willing to pay for it.
hpaleff
posted on July 11th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
The environmental advantages of fluorescent lamps should not keep us from acknowledging that fluorescent lamps are also likely to be significant contributors to an epidemic of blinding that now affects the first generation of Americans who grew up under those lamps in their classrooms.
The eye disease now known as age-related macular degeneration used to be called senile macular degeneration because people suffered from it only in their old age, typically in their eighties or nineties, and more rarely in their seventies [1]. Over the past two or three decades, however, this degeneration of the central retina began to start earlier and earlier in the lives of the victims, to the point where millions of Americans now lose their central vision to it in their sixties and fifties, and sometimes already in their forties. Meanwhile, age-related macular degeneration has also become the most common cause of irreversible vision loss in the Western world [2].
One of the major factors responsible for macular
degeneration appears to be the lifetime accumulation of
damage in the retina’s photoreceptors from exposure to
harmful light which gradually builds up a layer of debris from destroyed photoreceptors between the remaining ones and so uses up the limited renewal capacity of these [3, 4].
As established by many industrial safety studies, the most
harmful light for mammalian eyes is in the blue to violet range, with wavelengths from 430 to 440 nanometers. Unfortunately, fluorescent lamps emit a large portion of their total energy in a narrow spike at 435.8 nm, precisely in the most eye-damaging region. Adult humans are somewhat protected from this damage because our lens yellows with age, just as varnish does, and for the same reason of slow oxidation by free radicals created through long-term irradiation with light. This yellowing filters out much of the blue and violet from about our early twenties on, but these harmful wavelengths can freely penetrate into the still more transparent eyes of children. There they can cause an accelerated buildup of destroyed photoreceptors which diminishes the capacity of these to self-repair and so ultimately leads to the degeneration of the macula in later years.
It is therefore probably no coincidence that the non-senile
people who now experience the much earlier onset of macular degeneration are the first generation who spent much of their youth under fluorescent classroom lamps. The issue has not been studied officially, so there is presently no proven link between this early unprotected exposure to the most damaging light in the visible spectrum and the earlier
appearance of the damage generally connected with this type
of exposure. On the other hand, basic logic and elementary
prudence suggest to limit this potentially harmful irradiation of your children’s retinae until its long-term safety has been
established [5].
However, the current proposals to replace all incandescent
lamps with fluorescent ones for their energy savings ignore
this potential risk. Despite the best of intentions among those
who make these proposals, this insufficiently evaluated
technology could therefore bite back, like the once equally
touted DDT or chlorofluorocarbons, and cause much more
damage down the road than it appears to prevent now. If the
early exposure of children to fluorescent light in classrooms is a factor in the later observed accelerated degeneration of their maculae, as the circumstantial evidence suggests, then exposing them also at home to that eye-damaging light is likely to make their vision fail even earlier than that of their parents and grand-parents in the current epidemic of early-onset macular degeneration.
Unfortunately, the medical community is so vested in falsely denying the obvious blinding danger from the overly bright neonatologist-specified fluorescent nursery lamps to the eyes of premature babies [6] that it completely ignores the potential danger from the same lamps to that much larger population of all children. Indeed, none of the experts or agencies charged with assuring the health and safety of our children have issued any public warnings about the potential long-term effects of exposing children to now even more fluorescent light. They are not just asleep at the switch, they don’t even want to admit that it exists. But if you care about the future visual health of your children, evaluate the evidence yourself and form your own opinion.
Respectfully submitted,
H. Peter Aleff
prevent@retinopathyofprematurity.org
[1] David Miller: “Clinical Light Damage to the Eye”, Springer
Verlag, New York, 1987, pages 79-125.
[2] Henry Grunwald: “Losing Sight”, The New Yorker,
December 9, 1996, pages 62-67.
[3] David Miller: “Clinical Light Damage to the Eye”, Springer
Verlag, New York, 1987, see particularly pages 102 ff. in
chapter 6 on “Phototoxic Changes in the Retina” by John Weiter, pages 79-125.
[4] Waxler M and Hitchins VM, editors: “Optical Radiation and Visual Health”, CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida, 1986,
Chapter 6: “Optical Radiation and the Aged Eye” by Marshall
J, Greenstein V, Kline D, Owsley C, and Werner JS. See
Introduction and page 118 middle to bottom.
[5] For details, see retinopathyofprematurity.org/
maculardegeneration01.htm
[6] See my “Fake Science and Bogus Bioethics: Medical
Research Frauds against Premature Babies”, Medical Veritas,
Volume 4:1, pages 1378- 89, posted at
http://retinopathyofprematurity.org/01summary.htm
ledspro
posted on July 15th, 2007 at 12:30 am
Nice post, I think we are getting so close to have good LED replacements for traditional CFL and Fluorescent lamps… one example are the directional T8 LED Lamps, they are expensive, but we can make a comparision of the benefits, and after 2 years we are going to earn benefits from them.
And in the major part… the pollution, now mostly all kind of fluorescent lamps contains mercury, LEDs no… take a look http://www.mexled.com
=)
rabidbadger
posted on July 19th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
If you can’t find a local commercial recycler, check with your waste management company. Especially in California which has progressive landfill reduction rates. I know our local waste management company has a collection site open twice a month for everything from household cleaners to batteries, mercury and more dangerous products.
moodlites
posted on September 7th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
I wonder what will happen when we replace 4-5 billion light bulbs with mercury containing CFL’s? Especially when one CFL alone contaminates 1,000-6,000 gallons of water and we are having major water shortage issues already?
moodlites
posted on September 7th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
Even if we recycle – where does it go? where are we putting all of these toxic materials? how do we keep them from going back into the water supply?
melinda127
posted on October 4th, 2007 at 12:46 am
You can find recycling centers for specific items by going to Earth911.com. (oh guess what – you’re there !!!) At the top of the page, type in what you want to recycle or click the down arrow and choose from a list of items. Then enter your zip code. A list of business that take what you need to recycle will be listed whether it be batteries or plastic. The only item I couldn’t find a nearby recycling site for was fluorescent bulb. As we USE more fluorescent bulbs, I believe there is going to be more pressure on companies that sell them to take them back in recycling containers – like WalMart has done – and we need to push for that.
As far as the recycled items go…. they get recycled…reused, not just dumped into the environment. Materials such as mercury are safely collected and reused in other devices that use mercury for instance. It’s easy to just type in mercury recycling or something similiar. I just found out today that plastic bottles can be recycled into sweatshirts (polyester is a type of plastic).
“We do not own the earth, we borrow it from our children.”
Let’s keep it clean for them…