A Safer CFL Now on the Market
ArmorLite looks like an incandescent bulb because the fluorescent bulb is surrounded by a flexible eco safety-coated shield of SX-4000, is designed to help capture the broken glass and the mercury if the CFL is dropped. Photo: Clear-Lite
Compact fluorescent light bulbs use two-thirds less energy and last about 10 times longer than your standard incandescent bulb. Sounds like a no-brainer, right?
The bad news is that disposal is often an issue for these bulbs because they contain a small amount of mercury, about 4 milligrams to be exact.
Because CFL recycling is required by law in some states, it’s pretty easy to find a program that will take back your burned out bulb. But what if you accidentally break the CFL? The necessary steps to cleaning up the mess are extensive and include actually trashing contaminated items.
But a new product from Clear-Lite may be the solution to toxic breakage. While the new ArmorLite bulb isn’t mercury-free, it is designed using amalgam, an alloy of mercury combined with other metals in a solid form, making the usage of liquid mercury unnecessary.
In a design that looks similar to an incandescent, ArmorLite has an outer layer that protects the hazardous part of the bulb in case it is dropped. If broken, this layer will capture the shattered glass and the mercury. Listed as one of Popular Science magazine’s “must-have” products, its manufacturers tout it as being the “safest CFL on the planet.”
And it could very well be the safest thing we have for the time being. In a lab test performed by Cambridge Materials Testing, ArmorLite bulbs were dropped from a height of five feet and crushed on a counter. Still, no mercury was released from the bulbs.
According to Clear-Lite, independent third-party testing also found that the level of mercury was below the levels that the testing equipment was even able to detect, yet these bulbs still offer superior lighting.
However it’s unclear what the patent-pending SX4000 ECO Safety Coating is made from. More material usually translates to increased energy output and materials used during production, but this may be a trade-off we could live with if the design is one step toward creating a truly sustainable and safe CFL.
Read more
Yes, You Pay More For CFLs, But Are They Worth It?
Incandescent Bans Initiated in Europe, Set for U.S.
Learn to ‘Shift Your Habit’
As of June 17th 2011 we have upgraded our comment system to use Facebook comments. The below comments are closed and are listed for historical purposes.
Private Citizen
posted on April 20th, 2010 at 1:33 pm
I hate fluorescent lighting! They are hard on the eyes, do not give equivalent light for their stated watt-power, and have to be recycled. Give me a break. Those of us in rural America don’t have recycling centers anywhere near us, and I’m not going to use the gas and put wear and tear on my car to drive to a distant city large enough to have a recycler just to dispose of fluorescent bulbs.
But my biggest complaint in the nerve of the federal government telling me what kind of lighting I may use, and eventually making it impossible to use the kind I want. I like incandescent partly because it does give off heat. In winter time this makes a comforting difference.
Bill
posted on June 28th, 2010 at 3:56 pm
100% agree Private Citizen. I hate the CFL’s too. As far as recycling them, do what I do: put them in a solid color trash bag, back over them with the car (instant compaction) and pitch them in the trash. I agree that the government has NO RIGHT to tell me what kind of lighting I can use. As I’ve stated elsewhere, it boils down to the fact that you can get incandecents 4/1.00 at the dollar store as opposed to (minimum) 2.00 to 4.00 apiece for the damned CFL’s. Obviously the bulb manufactureres weren’t making the profit they wanted, so they got the government to enact this BS legislation. The amount of current the cfl’s save is inconsequential, payback takes YEARS , if at all, and they look like hell in my fixtures. Plus, some of my fixtures won’t even accept them, which neans MORE expense because I will have to replace the fixtures. All this because some tree-hugger wants to “stop global warming” which is BS anyway, and “save the spotted frog” or some other such nonsense at MY expense.
Bill
posted on June 30th, 2010 at 11:38 pm
Yes and how much do these “Armor LIte” light bulbs cost!?? Again it’s a question of money and the government or anyone else not having the right to tell me what kind of lighting I’m required to use and then enforcing it by eliminating my ability to get the ones that I DO want. It’s just like them getting rid of the tetraethyl lead in the gasoline. That was actual GAS!! It started well, ran great , gave good mileage and was cheap. Now this “witches brew” they try to pawn off as fuel is horrible. No mileage out of it, hard starting, all the fuel system components have to be plastic because of the corrosive nature of the fuel (which means when something breaks, which it does, being plastic) you can’t repair it you have to replkace a WHOLE component at some rediculously high price. Yeah this whole stinking environmental movement has be WONDERFUL!! :-(
Anonymous
posted on December 8th, 2010 at 4:32 pm
I don’t mind CFL bulbs. There are worse lighting options. I once worked in a place with high pressure sodium vapor lighting. This is the most horrid lighting I’ve seen used indoors. It’s bad enough used as street lighting. That workplace so overdid the lighting that I had a significant year-round “farmer tan”! Until I bought a watch and discovered a tan line where I wear it I thought the “perma-tan” was a result of an experiment I did in the 1980s.
Don’t like CFL bulbs? OK. But it could be worse!