Through Gerry Charlotte Phelps, I heard the story of a woman in Maine who, after breaking a CFL bulb (one of those “green” bulbs), ended up being stuck with a $2,000 hazardous waste disposal bill:
How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent lightbulb? About $4.28 for the bulb and labor — unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about $2,004.28, which doesn’t include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health.
Sound crazy? Perhaps no more than the stampede to ban the incandescent light bulb in favor of compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) — a move already either adopted or being considered in California, Canada, the European Union and Australia.
According to an April 12 article in The Ellsworth American, Bridges had the misfortune of breaking a CFL during installation in her daughter’s bedroom: It dropped and shattered on the carpeted floor.
Aware that CFLs contain potentially hazardous substances, Bridges called her local Home Depot for advice. The store told her that the CFL contained mercury and that she should call the Poison Control hotline, which in turn directed her to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.
The DEP sent a specialist to Bridges’ house to test for mercury contamination. The specialist found mercury levels in the bedroom in excess of six times the state’s “safe” level for mercury contamination of 300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter.
The DEP specialist recommended that Bridges call an environmental cleanup firm, which reportedly gave her a “low-ball” estimate of $2,000 to clean up the room. The room then was sealed off with plastic and Bridges began “gathering finances” to pay for the $2,000 cleaning. Reportedly, her insurance company wouldn’t cover the cleanup costs because mercury is a pollutant.
Intrigued (who wouldn’t be?), I Googled “Brandy Bridges Ellsworth Maine” and found a Snopes link to the story. (If you don’t know, Snopes is an urban legend debunking site, which is a very useful place to go.) The Snopes entry on the Brandy Bridges story is interesting because, even as it scoffs at the fact that someone would have to pay $2,000 to remove hazardous waste following a broken bulb, it acknowledges that these bulbs, if broken, create a hazardous waste risk that has to be cleaned up with special care. Thus, these bulbs do contain mercury and even less fraught county hazardous waste sites than that in Maine advise special clean-up. According to Snopes, the King County Hazardous Waste Program tells consumers who find themselves with broken bulbs to take the following steps:
How should I clean up a broken fluorescent bulb?
EPA recommends the following clean-up and disposal guidelines:
1. Open a window and leave the room (restrict access) for at least 15 minutes.
2. Remove all materials you can without using a vacuum cleaner.
*Wear disposable rubber gloves, if available (do not use your bare hands).
*Carefully scoop up the fragments and powder with stiff paper or cardboard.
*Wipe the area clean with a damp paper towel or disposable wet wipe.
*Sticky tape (such as duct tape) can be used to pick up small pieces and powder.3. Place all cleanup materials in a plastic bag and seal it.
*If your state permits you to put used or broken CFLs in the garbage, seal the CFL in two plastic bags and put into the outside trash (if no other disposal or recycling options are available).
*Wash your hands after disposing of the bag.4. The first time you vacuum the area where the bulb was broken, remove the vacuum bag once done cleaning the area (or empty and wipe the canister) and put the bag and/or vacuum debris, as well as the cleaning materials, in two sealed plastic bags in the outdoor trash or protected outdoor location for normal disposal.
Certainly, there’s a lot more effort involved there than with an old bulb, where the worry was only broken glass. I’m also willing to be that 99.999999% of consumers who use CFL bulbs have no idea that toxic mercury is floating around in their houses if they’re unlucky enough to break one.
The Maine Department of Environmental Protection, the jurisdiction where Brandy’s debacle began, layers on even more caveats, telling those unfortunate enough to have a broken bulb to find themselves a hazardous waste disposal site:
The most important thing to remember is to never use a vacuum . A standard vacuum will spread mercury-containing dust throughout the area as well as potentially contaminating the vacuum. What you should do is:
Keep people and pets away from the breakage area so that the mercury in the powder inside the bulb is not accidentally tracked into other areas.
* Ventilate the area by opening windows.
* If possible, reduce the temperature.
* Wear appropriate personal protective equipment, such as rubber gloves, safety glasses, old clothing or coveralls, and a dust mask (if you have one) to keep bulb dust and glass from being inhaled.
* Carefully remove the larger pieces and place them in a secure closed container or airtight plastic bag.
* Next, begin collecting the smaller pieces and dust. You can do this using a disposable broom and dustpan or two stiff pieces of paper to scoop up the pieces.
* Put all material into the container or airtight plastic bag. Pat the area with the sticky side of duct, packing or masking tape. Wipe the area with a damp cloth or paper towels to pick up fine particles.
* Put all waste and materials used to clean up the bulb in the secure closed container or airtight plastic bag and label it “Universal Waste – broken lamp”.
* Take the container for recycling as universal waste. To determine where your town has made arrangements for recycling of this type of waste, call your town office or check out the Maine Department of Environmental Protection website at http://www.maine.gov/dep/rwm/hazardouswaste/uwmuniciplemaster.xlsThe next time you replace a bulb, consider putting a drop cloth on the floor so that any accidental breakage can be easily cleaned up.
For those of you unfamiliar with it, let me fill you in a little about mercury poisoning, something familiar to most of us only in a slightly silly way as the cause of the Mad Hatter’s mania in Alice in Wonderland. (Hatters in the Victorian era used mercury in the hat-making process.) Mercury poisoning is miserable. Here’s the Wikipedia entry, which jives with my own independently acquired knowledge of the subject:
Mercury damages the central nervous system, endocrine system, kidneys, and other organs, and adversely affects the mouth, gums, and teeth. Exposure over long periods of time or heavy exposure to mercury vapor can result in brain damage and ultimately death. Mercury and its compounds are particularly toxic to fetuses and infants. Women who have been exposed to mercury in pregnancy have sometimes given birth to children with serious birth defects (see Minamata disease).
Some of the toxic effects of mercury are reversible, either through specific therapy or through natural elimination of the metal after exposure has been discontinued. However, heavy or prolonged exposure can do irreversible damage, particularly in fetuses, infants, and young children. Exposure to certain highly toxic compounds of mercury such as dimethylmercury can be fatal within hours or less.
Mercury exposure in very young children can have severe neurological consequences, preventing nerve sheaths from forming properly. Research has been done that demonstrates the inhibitory effect that mercury has on myelin, the building block protein that forms these sheaths.[1]
Mercury poisoning in the young is suspected as a possible cause of autistic behaviors, however there is a lack of quality peer-reviewed work on this matter and the claim of autism as mercury poisoning is considered suspect by mainstream medicine. Furthermore, the autistic community considers this theory offensive, as there is much evidence to suggest that autism is present from birth.
Humans or animals poisoned with mercury or its compounds often manifest excessive salivation, a condition called mercurial ptyalism.
The dire thing about mercury is how it infiltrates any area in which it finds itself. If dropped on a wooden floor, for example, it will roll into the cracks in the wood, making it impossible to clean. One might say “out of sight, out of mind,” but that’s not the case from mercury. You may not see it, but it’s continually releasing mercury vapors, which are extremely toxic. Here’s Wikipedia again:
Pure elemental mercury is a cumulative heavy-metal poison that is moderately absorbed through the skin, rather poorly absorbed through the gastrointestinal tract, and readily absorbed as vapor through the lungs. The element is strongly toxic when absorbed as vapor from the respiratory tract, but it is considerably less so when exposure occurs via other routes.
Many years ago, a doctor friend told me the story of a boy who came into the ER desperately ill. It didn’t take long for the doctors to figure out that he was suffering from acute mercury poisoning. It turned out, he had gotten hold of a vial with a few drops of mercury and had been playing with it in his bedroom. They were able to save his life, although there were a lot of permanent after effects. They were not, however, able to save his house. The mercury had permeated the structure so completely that his house had to be disposed of entirely as a hazardous waste site.
Given mercury’s manifest — and immediate — problems and dangers, you have to ask yourself whether there is any wisdom in creating a huge market for a product such as CFL bulbs. Factories drowning in mercury will be manufacturing them, and homes will be filled with them, with each bulb creating a small hazardous, and many bulbs creating a nasty cumulative hazard. Heck, you know it’s serious when even NPR gets a little worried. Once again, hysteria seems to be leading us to a very nasty unintended consequences.
UPDATE: Chris left a very knowledgeable sounding comment about real risks, so I’m repeating it here:
A typical CFL bulb apparently contains about 4mg of mercury. If this were spilled in an enclosed space, the resulting amount of mercury vapor would be about 54mg/cm3, or about 0.00005mg/m3. A typical bathroom (3′x6′x8′) would be about 4m3. The PEL (permissible exposure limit) for mercury vapor is 0.05mg/m3. That would be the allowed exposure limit for 8 hours.
This means if you broke a CFL bulb in a space the size of a bathroom, you could stand in there all day and not be affected by it. You could break one in your refrigerator, crawl in and spend the day with it, and not be affected by it, assuming your refrigerator had a supply of air for that long.
By the way, the EPA limit for elemental mercury in drain water is 3ppb, which is also the detection limit for mercury. That’s three parts per billion. Imagine looking through a parking lot of 1 billion white cars to find the 3 black ones. In other words, the EPA is taking no chances with mercury in waste water. They are engaging in massive overkill, if you will pardon the expression.
I’m not sufficiently versed in science or toxicology to know whether Chris is right, but it’s certainly comforting information if true.
Even absent the risks to individual homeowners, that still leaves me questioning the safety of manufacturing and disposing of all of these bulbs. What is trace mercury in any given bulb, is going to be lots of mercury at the site of origin or at the eventual landfill. (Although I’m a bit less worried about the latter, simply because I’ve operated under the assumption, naive perhaps, that modern landfills are built to handle a certain amount of toxic content.) I can’t find the darn citation right now, but I’m sure that, not so long ago, I read about a factory in which these bulbs are made which is itself an obvious biological hazard.
I’m aware that a lot of the things we routinely use originate at factories that use dangerous materials. Heck, all of our computers are awash in toxic ingredients. However, it does seem to me that it would be wise for us to make an intelligent effort to engage in a risk/benefit analysis for CFL bulbs before making a wholesale (and often legislated) switch to this technology.
On a personal note, because Mr. Bookworm is interested in saving money and saving the environment, we have switched a lot of our bulbs from incandescent to CFL. I hate them. No matter how sophisticated the technology used to mimic old-fashioned bulbs, I find the light colder than incandescent. That’s just a matter of aesthetics, though, and is not a good reason to cling to an outdated technology. More compelling, from my personal point of view, are functional problems with these bulbs: the bulbs buzz very loudly; they produce a flickering light that bounces off the margins of my glasses (and I can’t tell you how visually annoying that is); and the latter problem often triggers migraines. In other words, at a practical level, I find the bulbs less than optimal.
UPDATE II: Thomas Lifson, at the American Thinker blog (an off-shoot of American Thinker, and one of the best blogs around), used this post as the jumping off point for a fascinating first-hand story about the horrors of industrial mercury pollution — something only those of us past a “certain age” still remember in real time. I think his post ties in neatly with my point that, even if Chris is correct that the bomb in our home isn’t as serious as the EPA makes it sound, the fact remains that any industry that relies heavily on mercury is a very dangerous industry. And if the product that is being manufactured isn’t absolutely necessary to a society’s functioning, it may be very foolish to use knee jerk legislation and consumer panic to force the creation of a large market for that product.
UPDATE III: This is a clarification, because I don’t want people to think I’m a complete luddite about these CFL bulbs. There are definitely things as to which I’m a luddite, but bulbs aren’t one of those things. Instead, as with all these environmental initiatives, I don’t have a huge problem with the theory — lower energy use bulbs seem like a smart idea — but I hate the way we’re frantically being corralled in a specific direction and it’s that against which I rebel.
To those of you who suspect me of being excessively concerned and fomenting fear (sort of an anti-Green hysteria), that is not what I want to do. Instead, I’m just trying to get people to do a little looking before they do a lot of irremediable leaping. Somehow this whole thing reminds me of the DDT ban in the early 1970s, based on Rachel Carson’s flawed science. There’s no doubt that birds are definitely still around but, sadly, millions of people around the world have been killed or had their lives destroyed by malaria.
Filed under: Climate change
Heck, you know it’s serious when even NPR gets a little worried. Once again, hysteria seems to be leading us to a very nasty unintended consequences.
is it unintended though, book?
Since environmentalist lobbies care little for human quality of life, wouldn’t it be a good thing to have people forced into using poisonous light bulbs? Wouldn’t that force people to stop using light bulbs at all? And wouldn’t that save on energy and costs?
There’s a reason why government regulation and forcing people to do things, is a bad thing. The government is neither omniscient nor wise enough to know what to do, so their one standard applies to all solution has the effect of forcing people to do things their common sense would otherwise prevent them from doing. But since it is not the government being affected… they have no motivation in correcting things. Motivation is a very important human trait. Government must be made to be motivated to secure human safety. But you don’t have to motivate indivdiual men and women into protecting their life, Book. So one way wastes energy doing what can otherwise be done freely on an individual, free market, way.
The environmentalists have no compunction about making people not use nuclear energy because of the hysteria they have produced propaganda wise. But you start to notice that they also don’t care about real threats, so long as their agenda and Gore’s money accounts, are balanced and growing.
My theory, which I described to Laer, simply states that the environmental lobby or Global Warmie Cult, seeks to make the problem worse, environmentally and humanistically speaking. By making the problem worse, they can then come in and say they have the “solution”. Much as snakeoil salesmen told folks they had the panacea to their aches and pains.
They claim that they can get business to be better operated by producing government regulation.. their government regulation. But what kind of sense does that make? That businesses would spend more on environment protection when they knew that if they just threw enough money into politics, they can get the government to leave them alone? You see how that works on a human motivation level. Make people afraid for their self-survival, whether individuals or companies, and they will resist far more effectively than the one size fits all plan of a distant government who is not motivated concerning self-survival.
So the more government regulation, the less money businesses will spend on environment friendly technology and more on politics, donating to Democrats. They know the Democrats have a hankering for the moola. Feinstein, Reid, Pelosi… they know. They know what’s the appropriate price. In this situation, the more the businesses become worse environmentally, then the more powerful the politicians, because the politicians are gaining money and support from businesses, while at the same time they are tapping into the public hysteria because the problem is getting worse.
I cannot really believe, in the end Book, that these are “unintended consequences”. They are nasty, but as the environmentalists say, you can’t save the world without breaking a few human nest eggs.
A typical CFL bulb apparently contains about 4mg of mercury. If this were spilled in an enclosed space, the resulting amount of mercury vapor would be about 54mg/cm3, or about 0.00005mg/m3. A typical bathroom (3′x6′x8′) would be about 4m3. The PEL (permissible exposure limit) for mercury vapor is 0.05mg/m3. That would be the allowed exposure limit for 8 hours.
This means if you broke a CFL bulb in a space the size of a bathroom, you could stand in there all day and not be affected by it. You could break one in your refrigerator, crawl in and spend the day with it, and not be affected by it, assuming your refrigerator had a supply of air for that long.
By the way, the EPA limit for elemental mercury in drain water is 3ppb, which is also the detection limit for mercury. That’s three parts per billion. Imagine looking through a parking lot of 1 billion white cars to find the 3 black ones. In other words, the EPA is taking no chances with mercury in waste water. They are engaging in massive overkill, if you will pardon the expression.
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Minimata, and every other mercury poisoning case of which I’m aware, was caused by ingestion of “methyl mercury”, which occurs when metallic mercury is worked over biologically. In this form, it is quite easily taken up and causes terrible problems.
As a kid in the ’50s, we played with metallic mercury regularly – there was no hysteria about it at the time. The amount of mercury in each bulb is miniscule, and leaving the room for 15 minutes is a ludicrous recommendation — ask what is supposed to be the benefit of doing this….
By the way, did you check Snopes on that story of a few drops of mercury polluting a house so that it had to be treated as a hazardous waste site? Please.
In short, I have serious doubts that the amount in a bulb
poses any significant risk whatever. Just sweep it up, throw it away, and get on with your life.
By the way — we also HATE the light put out by CF bulbs, to say nothing of the flicker and what they do to radio reception, so we use incandescents and pay the extra for electricity. And if they ban them, we’ll probably order them from Mexico!!
Earl:
The few drops of mercury house is a real story. My physician friend was telling it to me in real time as it played out. The City determined that mercury levels in that house were so high it couldn’t be remediated and they tore it down. Of course, that may fall in Chris’s category of government agencies going over the top to ensure that no one is exposed to even minimal amounts of toxicity, regardless of the actual amount at which injury can result.
Many people have pointed to websites and literature pointing out that these CFLs and their mercury content *shouldn’t* be a problem if you break one bulb. But in the above case in Maine, where a bulb was actually broken, the Department of Environmental did a measurement (probably several days after the bulb was broken, at that) and determined that the mercury content was above the safe level. It is crazy that people like Instapundit push the “what should be” angle and ignore the actual case! Plus, what if you break more than one bulb? Maybe you drop the whole pack. Or I move into a house – do I know if bulbs were broken in that house? Were they cleaned up properly? I won’t know.
I am waiting for the LED bulbs to become cheaper – then I’ll make the switch. Until then, I am sticking with Edison.
We use large amounts of mercury in manufacturing processes here every day. The people who work in those departments constantly monitor the rooms for mercury levels, and they undergo periodic urine testing for contamination. Mercury is nasty stuff, but if you know what you’re doing and pay attention, it’s not a problem.
Whether anyone involved in promoting these bulbs knows what they’re doing is anyone’s guess, but people throw regular fluorescent bulbs away, and they contain a whole lot more mercury than the compact ones. In fact, many different lamp types contain mercury, because it’s very useful in getting things going inside the lamp.
BTW, I made those calculations based on a couple of minutes googling. They should be OK, but they are kind of back of the envelope.
“Mercury is nasty stuff, but if you know what you’re doing and pay attention, it’s not a problem.”
Since most people won’t know what their doing and pay attention , I take this to mean there will likely be problems.
I don’t hold a brief for fluorescents of any kind, as I pointed out before. I use incandescents and will continue to do so. But what is going on currently – including the Maine case, and especially the one BW refers to – is hysteria.
Show me the backlog of brain damage and other horrors from the casual way in which people all over the United States treated metallic mercury in the 1950s and ’60s….
(Anyone remember dipping a penny into mercury and making it all silvery?)
I’m not arguing it’s a good idea to play with mercury. I’m also not arguing for CF bulbs. I’m just saying if you’re going to spend time and energy worrying about your health, pay attention to what happens when you get into your car, or what you put in your mouth at dinner tonight. Or even whether that lightning bolt is going to strike you when you go outside next time. Mercury poisoning isn’t even on the radar screen – even if you are like Mr. BW and insist on living with that blue flicker!!
I have fond memories of flickering buzzing fluorescent light bulbs in the the reading lamp above my bed as a child, and the one over the sink at my grandma’s house. I had always liked them….the way I loved Dr. Seuss. Until I was forced to read Green Eggs and Ham to my children. Over. and Over. and Over. and Over….I hate Dr. Seuss, with a passion, Sam I am, and I’m sure to hate the new light bulbs, too….just because they want to make me use them.
The thing is, that 4mg is concentrated in a tiny little light bulb, whether powdered substance or something else. Any immediate exposure would be exposure to that concentrated portion of mercury. There’s no guarantee that there will be enough time for it to disperse, or vaporize.
[...] I’m not even sure I can afford to break one of these curly lightbulbs I have all through the [...]
Radicals in cells and Mercury in cracks
Make you afraid of another attack
Who will save us the Democrats ?
Look, ymarsakar’s last comment sums up the problem. Mercury can only harm you if it’s ingested. That means you have to eat it, or absorb the vapors, either by inhalation or by skin adsorption. You don’t want it to vaporize, and it doesn’t at room temperature. It does have a vapor pressure, which is what I based my calculations on. If you don’t lick up the pool, or snort it, or rub it into your skin, 4mg of mercury cannot possibly harm you, and even if you ate it, it can’t harm you, because elemental mercury is not soluble in your body. It will come back out. Mercury vapors are toxic, as are some mercury compounds if ingested.
Look, I know something about this, but all I did was google for less than two minutes, and I had all the information I needed. Granted, I knew what to do with that data. In the words of the immortal Peter Venkman, “Back off. I’m a scientist.” And I am every bit the scientist that he was.
The following is an excerpt from an article written by Richard Reis, P.E. in July 2007. It contains a good comparison of lifecycle emission of mercury and CO2 for both CFLs and conventional lamps. The original article can be found here:
http://maryland.sierraclub.org/newsletter/archives/2007/07/a_012.asp
“The two examples below provide a comparison between a CFL and a conventional lamp. (An mg is 1/1000 of a gram. A microgram is 1/1000 of an mg.
Ten 100-watt conventional lamps have a lifetime equal to one CFL.
Each conventional incandescent lamp lasts 1,000 hours. The 10 lamps then consume 1,000 kWh (100w x 10,000 hours) over their lifetimes. To supply these lamps, power plants will emit about 23 mg of mercury and 2,000 pounds of CO2. A consumer will spend $5 to buy these lamps (50¢ each) and $100 in energy costs to power them at 10¢ per kWh for a total of $105. The light output is 1,500 lumens or about 15 lumens per watt. Note: Conventional bulbs may contain lead solder, and lead is a powerful toxin as well.
One 23-watt CFL has the equivalent output of a 100-watt incandescent lamp.
The lamp lasts 10,000 hours and consumes 230 kWh over its lifetime. To supply that lamp, power plants will emit about 5.2 mg of mercury and about 460 pounds of CO2. Improper disposal of the lamp (for example, if it is consumed in a municipal incinerator) will result in 5.1 mg of mercury entering the environment. In this case the total emissions will be 10.3 mg mercury or about half of the emissions using conventional lamps. However, most jurisdictions provide facilities that allow residents to responsibly dispose of CFLs and other hazardous waste.
For example, Montgomery County residents can dispose of CFLs at its transfer station and at special hazardous waste collection events. The City of Takoma Park accepts used CFLs at its public works building on Oswego Avenue during business hours and in a drop box at other times. Ikea stores have recycling stations that accept light bulbs, batteries, and plastic bags. (You can find out more about lamp recycling at Earth911.org and LampRecycle.org.) One can buy these lamps at Home Depot and other places for $2.50 each and spend $23 (again at 10¢ per kWh) to power them—a total cost of just $25.50 versus $105 using conventional lamps. The light output is 1,500 lumens or 65 lumens/ watt. “