Energy Saving Light Bulbs 'Contain Cancer Causing Chemicals'

I feel guilty. I am caring for vegetable seedlings in someone's bedroom and thus have eight of these fluorescent lights in use. I used very persuasive techniques to attain usage of this space.

I invested hundreds of dollars in my set-up, thinking that it would be a good long term solution. Now, I realize that I could possibly be poisoning loved ones.

I require artificial light for one more month. Should I sacrifice the strength of my plants and set them in the window?

I am in such a moral dilemma right now: Reduce my crop yield significantly, or subject everyone to one more month of exposure.

if one ever break one in your house, you had better hope you dont inhale the fumes, the other issue is i wonder how few of the lazy north americans are actually diposing of them properly.

On the bright side they do produce alot more light than incandesent bulbs, a 13 watt is equal to a 60 watt in lumens and they have a better spectum for plants and such.


My idea is switch to LEDs is you have any worrys

reply to post by flushy


you not going to drop dead just get LED lights next year Great prices at home depot . I use cfls for my plants and they don't have cancer, well i mean, atleast they dont have tumors

reply to post by ziccy


I have come very close to breaking them on multiple occasions. I was contemplating switching to LEDs, but I am rather short on funds right now.

As for lazy North Americans, I know what some of them do for disposal:

When I was a teenager, I worked in the receiving area of a store. They would take old fluorescent tube lights outside in garbage bags and smash them against the pavement. The debris were not always confined to the bag. I participated in this once and it felt wrong.

Is this the proper disposal method? If it is I think it should be reconsidered. Perhaps shooting them into the sun with a rocket would be better.

Originally posted by XmikaX
reply to post by burntheships

 

and they are full of mercury. so basically if you break one in your house you need to evacuate and call a decontamination team.

I wonder what you supposed to do after an earthquake ? evacuate the city or die ?

I wondered about that as I was posting this thread, and thought of Japan. What in the world are these
crazy Governments thinking!

So, in an earthquake how many of these things could be broken?

Toxic mercury everywhere!

Honestly this is so insane there has to be a conspiracy in this somewhere!

reply to post by burntheships


This is just for an idea of magnitude regarding the quantity of mercury released in a disaster.

There are 53,890,900 housing units and with an average of 4.77 rooms in Japan as of 2003.

80 percent of light bulbs in Japan are CFLs.

There is 3 to 5mg mercury per CFL light.

Therefore if a quake destroys 1000 homes with one light in each room and 10% of the lights break.

1000*4.77*1*0.1*0.8*4 = 1526.4 mg mercury from just residential units

I am sure with searching one could find better numbers for the number of lights per room and make a better guess regarding the number of lights that break in an earthquake.

In a similar fashion commercial and industrial areas could be calculated.

Also, this is a very rough estimate, but again, this is just to see the order of magnitude. I think it would be safe to say that the quantity from a quake would be measured in grams.

Is 1 or 2 grams of mercury released significant? Is 100 grams safe? I guess an environmental expert would have to answer this question.

In my opinion, no amount of mercury is safe to release into the environment. Nature has a balance and things like this are offsetting that balance.

reply to post by burntheships


and hardly anybody knows about it, so in fact what would happen is nothing and nobody would pay any attention to that released mercury.

trying to raise awareness on this bulbs everywhere i go but not many listen, they seem to just see what the advertising tells them, cheap, last longer etc

reply to post by XmikaX


I must admit I was in the dark on this until a strange thing happened to me.
I used some of these cfl bulbs in a bathroom. One of the bulbs must have leaked, as
one afternoon I was in the bathroom and all of the sudden I was choked by a toxic smell,
terrible odor and my eyes began to burn, I could not breathe and I looked up and noticed that one
of the light bulbs was turning brown around the glass next to the metal joint where it forms the part
you screw in. It began to darken, and the smell got worse!

I left the bathroom immediately, shut the door, and left it that way for a day.
When I did go in, I looked at the bulb, and that area had turned a dark brown dark grey color.

I dont really know what happened, but I felt sick all day...

There are people using these bulbs, in Europe, and here in the U.S. that dont even know about the hazards
and disposal guidelines. Let alone if these were to break enmasse during a quake!

Literally a nightmare waiting to happen!

reply to post by flushy

Originally posted by flushy
reply to post by burntheships

 

This is just for an idea of magnitude regarding the quantity of mercury released in a disaster.

There are 53,890,900 housing units and with an average of 4.77 rooms in Japan as of 2003.

80 percent of light bulbs in Japan are CFLs.

There is 3 to 5mg mercury per CFL light.

Therefore if a quake destroys 1000 homes with one light in each room and 10% of the lights break.

1000*4.77*1*0.1*0.8*4 = 1526.4 mg mercury from just residential units

Thanks for the math, I hope to do some checking on this...

I think these bulbs should be taken off the market, and the legislation overturned!

I was just looking at LEDbulb.com thiers a 60W replacement bulb, uses something like 8 watts, the A19 model for $22.50
thiers another model i saw, greyish, uses about 6 watts to make 60 watts, for $19.99 i cant find any better priced than that.

reply to post by dolphinfan


I figured this out abuot 2 1/2 years ago, since joiig and learning here at ATS, and doing my own investigations and conclsuions online. GE i will never be buying form again ever. theyve lost my business. if they havnt takne over governemnt corporation dealing in energy areas, thier laying off workers and on the same lets go green thing..like al gore* only they dont care* its called monopoloziing* and since degregualting went on big time under bush jr. GE was part of it. cmon..GE a month ago, spokeperson said dont let japans crisis deter yuo from nuclear energy* what an idiot. he siad something along the lines of its perfectly safe as well. mhmmm i guess thats why its radioactive over thier hugh? stupid GE has gone downhill ever since being too corportized

reply to post by burntheships

Thanks for the math, I hope to do some checking on this.

It would be interesting to develop a statistical model that would accurately predict the released mercury. After watching the evening news and seeing the results of a disaster you could see how much mercury was released. I have a feeling that if you were to combine this with numbers from other pollutants, the result would be sickening.

Imagine surviving an earthquake, seemingly unscathed, thinking "Wow, wasn't I lucky" just to find out a year later that your brain is half melted, your thyroid stopped working and have lung cancer.

At least if you calculated it, you would understand where your sickness came from.

Originally posted by flushy

Imagine surviving an earthquake, seemingly unscathed, thinking "Wow, wasn't I lucky" just to find out a year later that your brain is half melted, your thyroid stopped working and have lung cancer.

Yes, while the earthquakes are natural disasters, the cancer causing government is not!
I know which one I feel more threatened by!

all I can say about this is "LOL"
I wish that the internet and ATS was around when microwaves came out. Oh god the fits people would have been throwing and all the posts about people claiming it was the microwave that caused them to get pregnant and made their unborn child resemble the Jolly Green Giant.

I don't see many younger people (mid 20's or younger) freaking out about this. This might be because they aren't as informed, or simply don't care enough to listen or look into this. It could also be because younger people aren't as afraid of change as people in their late 30's and up.

Maybe younger people are just more evolutionarily safe from all these terribly harmful things that our light bulbs are doing to us.

Originally posted by burntheships

Originally posted by flushy
1000*4.77*1*0.1*0.8*4 = 1526.4 mg mercury from just residential units

Thanks for the math, I hope to do some checking on this...

I think these bulbs should be taken off the market, and the legislation overturned!

You don't understand the math, because switching back to incandescent would increase mercury pollution, not decrease it.

1526.4 mg is 1.526 grams

1.526 grams is 0.002203 pounds

0.002203 pounds is 0.0000011013 tons

Compare this to the output of mercury from coal burning plants:

www.ens-newswire.com...

The top 50 most-polluting coal-burning power plants in the United States emitted 20 tons of toxic mercury into the air in 2007...
In April 2006, the plant's operator, Alabama Power, announced it would spend $200 million to remove nitrogen oxide emissions by 2008 and sulfur dioxide emissions by 2011, but no mercury removal technology has been announced for the Miller plant.

That's 0.4 tons of mercury emitted PER YEAR for each of those coal burning plants, or 800 pounds.

If people stopped using mercury-laden fluorescent bulbs and went back to the incandescent bulbs they replaced, you would need 5 power plants to make the same amount of light, which is 4 additional power plants.

4 additional power plants x 800 pounds of mercury per plant per year = 3,200 pounds.

That's 3,200 pounds of mercury every year!!!

Shouldn't we be more worried about that, than a one-time release of 0.002203 pounds in Japan's tsunami?

Now the LEDs as some people have said may be the best alternative, but they are also claimed to contain toxic materials, however as far as I can tell the toxins are sealed inside the bulb.

But the bulbs with mercury in them actually result in less mercury pollution than the incandescent bulbs with no mercury, because of the power plant pollution issue. If you want to do something helpful, write your representatives to get them to get tough on clean air and reduce mercury emissions from coal plants. you'll pay more for your electricity, but it's worth it to avoid the pollution.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


I am sorry to say that your whole post does not make any sense!

Get rid of both of them!

You have heard of scrubbers?

Originally posted by ElectricWizard
reply to post by burntheships

 

I HATE these new "energy" saving light bulbs.. They break after a few months of use and they have mercury in them (which is energy costly to dispose of properly and of course unhealthy). A lot of these "energy saving" things aren't energy saving at all..

Yes, LEDs are the future.. they are a bit costly to make now, but as time goes on they will get cheaper.

edit on 21-4-2011 by ElectricWizard because: (no reason given)

Well in defense of cfl's, they are over-driven by design. It's just like how a lot of solar panels are manufactured by gas companies..Once they turn black on the ends they stop working in the ballast. One circuit I have will light blackened bulbs with no problem, just like new, and also use 1/5th the energy..These cfl ballasts are cfl killers. But of course if you design and build a light system that doesn't die, then you don't make a profit.. That's the main problem with our society.. It's not about making good products, it about convincing consumers to buy inferior products that break down in a timely manner, so that they have to buy it over and over. If money and profits is the goal, we will never have efficient clean systems, that's just the sad cold fact. That is unless you build them yourself..

Again, until you get rid of "Invention Secrecy Act of 1951" you will never have clean, efficient systems available to the general public..

Thus, the 1971 list indicates that patents for solar photovoltaic generators were subject to review and possible restriction if the photovoltaics were more than 20% efficient.

reply to post by burntheships
Not only have I heard of scrubbers, but the quote I posted talked about Alabama power spending $200 million on one. But unfortunately, it won't remove any mercury.

reply to post by Arbitrageur

You don't understand the math, because switching back to incandescent would increase mercury pollution, not decrease it.

You failed to read the context of the example. It was simply to conservatively estimate the order of magnitude of mercury released from 1000 destroyed residential units. There are many more factors you must examine before making this comparison.

Originally posted by flushy
You failed to read the context of the example.

No I understood the context of the example precisely. You'll notice I didn't do anything to correct your 1.5 gram calculation, and that part of the math is perfectly fine, but as you said it's not the big picture, that's the only problem I had with it.