From The Frying Pan Into The Fire?
August 14th, 2008 categories: Rants & Riffs
Are those ice cream swirl shaped light bulbs really that good for the environment? Surprise, surprise, surprise! They contain mercury! Yes that same mercury that makes some fish very dangerous to eat. So let’s see we are be told to change all of our incandescent light bulbs for these energy saving replacements. And when all of us start throwing these millions of mercury laced light bulbs into land fills, then what? Could the mercury leaching into our water tables poison us? I don’t know, but we better think about the unintentional outcomes of our choices! A report from npr.org (not generally considered a right wing think tank) goes into the problems in great detail.
“But the bulbs contain small amounts of mercury, a neurotoxin, and the companies and federal government haven’t come up with effective ways to get Americans to recycle them.
“The problem with the bulbs is that they’ll break before they get to the landfill. They’ll break in containers, or they’ll break in a dumpster or they’ll break in the trucks. Workers may be exposed to very high levels of mercury when that happens,” says John Skinner, executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North America, the trade group for the people who handle trash and recycling.
Skinner says when bulbs break near homes, they can contaminate the soil.
Mercury is a potent neurotoxin, and it’s especially dangerous for children and fetuses. Most exposure to mercury comes from eating fish contaminated with mercury,
Some states, cities and counties have outlawed putting CFL bulbs in the trash, but in most states the practice is legal.”
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Today’s picture of downtown Honolulu was taken from the Hawaii Super Ferry while it sat at its’ mooring.
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