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Re: Sunday, May 20, 2007
Fluorescents more environmentally friendly? I wonder. Sure, they use less power, but ... I read an article online somewhere around a month ago that told of bad mercury contamination in a home where someone dropped and broke one of those fluorescent lamps. They all contain some mercury, you know. The homeowner had to pay thousands of dollars for the cleanup. I don't know whether the environmental protection people who evaluated that incident and required the cleanup overreacted or not. To be honest, I've never heard of contamination problems from broken traditional long-tube fluorescents. Maybe problems with them were swept under the rug, or maybe the new compact fluorescents are built differently and are a bigger problem. I simply don't know. And that was just one lamp. Imagine the effect of thousands of old fluorescent lamps being disposed of in a few years. I don't know whether they'll go into the landfill or whether some special disposal program will be set up (I haven't looked into the recent proposed legislation). Either way, it seems to be a problem we don't have with incandescent lamps. It wouldn't surprise me that this is another case of short-sighted (or intentionally deceptive) legislators, going for the currently-fashionable, make-them-look-good action without regard to the long-term negative consequences. Of course, if there really is a disposal problem, they'll all have reaped the good publicity and have moved on to bigger and better (read: more destructive) things long before the nasty aspects become enough of a problem for the public to take notice. And the public probably won't remember who caused the problem (a few will, but most won't). Sometimes I wonder whether there is any hope for us. There are responses to this message:
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