cleverlymadeup said:
JWAN said:
Tungsten steel you can recycle, and its in high demand. CFLs contain toxic mercury. In California, it's already illegal to throw them away. If one breaks and the authorities find out, the costs of bio hazard cleanup are enormous. There is a VERY important reason why you need to recycle these bulbs.
tungsten lights burn the filament making them recycling useless
also 1 breaking is NOT an enormous clean up, if a bunch of them together did then possibly but only one isn't too bad unless you happen to be sucking on it
so you support using a very ineffective and wasteful source of light in order to recycle something and drive up the damage to the environment even more.
mercury is dangerous in small amounts and if it hits ground water the area is screwed
besides the energy needed to attempt to recycle (you cant send them to a landfill) one of those bulbs you might as well use a regular freakin light. Do the math,if the bulbs are broken the mercury is already released, making recycling impossible (only 3% are disposed of properly) you need to send these things by the truckload in a hazardous chemical vehicle to a plant, and depending where you live it could be a hundred miles away, not to mention a few hundred gallons of diesel or gasoline will be burned up in the process. THEN once it gets there you gotta power the building, pay the workers extra for working with hazardous materiel's and then attempt to recycle them in such a way that they don't spill the contaminants. Now when you put up a specialty recycling plant to deal with mercury where do you put it? Who wants that near their house? No one, unless you work there.
and these things are supposed to be efficient?
More states are starting to use the gasses that are created in landfills to burn as a clean energy source, if you have a landfill that has a few thousand CFL's (a few years a million or so) in it your going to be getting mercury in the burner at some point. Once that settles in a lake, stream, or your swimming pool you going to have some health issues.
With a regular bulb, you buy a pack of 50, its just glass and it wont "fill up" a landfill. and when it burns our or breaks you don't need to wear gloves to handle it. You don't need to send it with a warning label to a recycling plant that's far away and you don't need to worry about a chemical that will stay in the water for ever. (if it gets in the fish population, which it will, even over time mercury will not get watered down, it will always be hazardous to humans and the local wildlife population, the very thing they were supposed to protect.
