Greenwashing Lamps

Mercury & health

Although the European Commission does not regard it as an immediate risk to the average user, CFLs contain small amounts of mercury and this is a risk, if lamps are broken and mercury escapes into the air and is inhaled (since mercury vapourises at room temperature). Swedish environmental expert Minna Gillberg, adviser to Commissioner Margot Wallström, says all CFL bulbs should be marked with a skull-&-bones label to increase awareness among consumers. [1]

Although the risk of breaking a CFL at home is probably not overwhelmingly huge if people are informed of the risk and take care not to place them in luminaires that are easily knocked over, and though the amount of mercury each bulb contains usually is minute and decreasing with age, even small amounts of mercury vapour may be harmful to inhale, especially for children, pregnant women and sensitive people. Therefore both manufacturers and various national health protection agencies have issued safety instructions in case of CFL (or mercury thermometer) breakage. [2, 3, 4]

How should I deal with a broken CFL?

In the event of an accidental breakage of a CFL, normal good housekeeping is required.

1. Take care to prevent injury from broken glass.

2. Vacate the room and keep children and pets out of the affected area. Shut off central air conditioning system, if you have one.

3. Ventilate the room by opening the windows for at least 15 minutes before clean up.

4. Do not use a vacuum cleaner, but clean up using rubber gloves and aim to avoid creating and inhaling airborne dust as much as possible.

5. On hard surfaces sweep up all particles and glass fragments with stiff cardboard and place everything, including the cardboard, in a plastic bag. Wipe the area with a damp cloth and then add that to the bag. Household cleaning products should be avoided during clean up despite the very small amount of mercury involved. See the next section for cleaning carpeted surfaces.

6. Use sticky tape to pick up small residual CFL pieces or powder from soft furnishings and then add that to the bag.

7. The plastic bag should be reasonably sturdy and needs to be sealed, but it does not need to be air tight. The sealed plastic bag should be double-bagged to minimise cuts from broken glass. [3]

If you’re a U.S. citizen, you can always order a Philips Spill-kit for ‘only’ $100.00…

“Offers Customers the tools to handle the clean up of broken mercury containing lamps. The materials may be placed in a sealed plastic bag and sent to EPSI in the standard EPSI-PAK lamp recycle box. Kit includes a pail containing training video, safety data sheets, instructions, guidelines for clean-up, mercury chemical information, gloves, scraper, brush, pan, dust mask, safety goggles, sponge pads, plastic sealable bags and large plastic bags.”

Update: Unfortunately, the Maine DEP found when testing that plastic bags are not enough to contain the mercury, not even air tight plastic containers. See second half of my newer post Mercury Problem Worse Than Suspected.

CFL mercury may also constitute a health hazard if thrown away with household garbage or in glass recycling containers:

“‘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.” [5]

Mercury & coal

The European Commission, however, continues to defend the CFL despite its mercury content, using one of the oldest CFL lobby arguments in the book:

“Indeed the decrease of mercury emissions resulting from energy savings (electricity generation in power plants has its own mercury emissions) outweighs the need for mercury in the lamps.”

That the anti-lightbulb campaign in early 1990s came up with the idea to blame powerplant emissions on the lightbulb in order to get around the uncomfortable fact that FL and CFL contain mercury, is not as surprising as the fact that so many keep regurgitating this argument without ever stopping to consider the blatant flaws in it!

One eloquent exception is Dr Peter Thornes:

“This is based on North American studies, crucially making various assumptions:

“1. That most power is derived from coal. It is about 1/3 in the UK, for example, 1/5 in Ireland, and of course substantially less (and decreasing) in many countries. As an example, the US Government EPA 2002 5-year comparison diagram, variations of which are often used by ban proponents, assumes all power comes from coal, concluding that in such situations CFLs are better.”

“2. That emissions remains at the fixed levels. Power station mercury release has for a long time been treatable by using wet scrubbers (chemical, not human, I hasten to add), in combination with recently cheaper and more effective injection and photochemical techniques.”

“If and where power station mercury release is a problem, ecological warriors might want to do something about it, rather than just use it as an excuse to ban light bulbs. In a nutshell:

“1. What comes out of ever decreasing coal power stations chimneys can be dealt with: we know where the problem sources are and we can treat them with ever increasing efficiency at lower costs.

“2. Compare that with scattered broken lights on all the dump sites, we do not know where the broken lights are, and we can’t do anything about them.” [6]

Danish LCA study:

Update 13 Sept (copied from the LCA page): For those who still believe that incandescent bulbs “cause more mercury emissions via coal plants”, please understand that it really is nothing but a cheap PR trick which seems to originate from the pro-CFL/anti-lightbulb lobby organisation IAEEL 1993, and based alternately on:

I. U.S. conditions in which, at that time, 59% of electricity production came from coal. June 2008 it was 48,5% and decreasing. [7]

II. A Danish ‘study’ (= calculation excercise) from 1991 [8] in which a 60W (730 lm) 1000h incandescent (GLS) was compared with a 15W (900 lm) 8000h CFL, the latter assumed to contain only 0.69 mg mercury (impossible to attain at that time), while electricity production from coal was assumed at 95% (as was the case in Denmark at that time – the highest in Europe!) [9]. Based on these assumptions, CFLs were estimated to emit 1.69 mg mercury per million lumen-hour during production, operation and crapping phase, and incandescents 4.86 mg. However, these figures were seriously flawed then, and are even more so today:

a. “0.69 mg mercury” in CFLs seems like a random fantasy figure, especially back in 1991! In 1993, IAEEL estimated CFLs to contain an average of 5 mg. [10] EU consultants VITO consider 4 mg to be a realistic average now. [11] (Both are extremely pro-CFL and are not likely to exaggerate.)

b. According to EuroStat, the EU share of coal used in electricity production was 39% in 1991 and has since decreased to 29% in 2006 (though varying widely between countries, some use no coal at all). [12]

Correcting for a and b (while still assuming the 15W CFL to give as much light as a 60W GLS and lasting 8 times longer) we get:

- GLS operation phase: 4.86 mg – 66% = 1.65 mg (as long as EU permits unfiltered coal emissions) = total 1.65 mg Hg on average. (In countries that don’t use fossil fuels for electricity production, like Luxembourg, Iceland, Norway, Sweden & Switzerland, the sum total is 0.)

- CFL operation phase: 1 mg – 66% = 0.34 mg + scrapping phase (assuming no recycling): 4 mg = total 4.34 mg Hg.

In other words, when feeding correct numbers into the calculation, we get the opposite result!

Mercury in China and India

Also note that there are both automated and non-automated factories in China. In the small, non-automated factories, workers distribute the mercury and phosphors into each CFL by hand! Besides the risk of easily exceeding the specified limits, mercury vapourises at room temperature [13] and Chinese factories are not exactly known for issuing protective gear to factory workers. How ‘green’ is it to poison Chinese labourers and create more toxic waste?

* Not to mention other developing countries where recycling comes very low down on poor people’s list of priorities. India’s lighting industry, for example, already uses 56 tons of mercury per year. If they are forced to increase the use of FL/CFL from current 10% to 100%, that will be 560 tons! [14]

This is truly alarming, considering the fact that one teaspoon of mercury is enough to poison a medium-sized lake!

Once you’ve opened Pandora’s box and let the mercury out, there is no way of putting it back in again; it will just keep circulating and climb its way up the food chain. Thus, focus should be on the direct sources of mercury: fluorescent light and fossil fuels. Stop mercury emissions it at the source before its too late!

Ban CFLs!

In my opinion, only FL tubes, CFLs and HID lights used professionally should be exempt from the EU mercury ban, as most factories, offices and shops already have well established routines for recycling tubes and lamps correctly and especially linear fluorescent tubes tend to be returned as they don’t fit in standard trash cans.

To put such a burden on private individuals – who usually already have enough to worry about without needing the extra hassle of safely disposing burned-out bulbs for recycling – can certainly not be called a wise and responsible decision.

1. Nyhetskanalen: “Expert varnar för lågenergilampor”
2. U.S. NPA: Mercury – Spills, Disposal and Site Cleanup
3. U.K Health Protection Agency: Fact sheet on mercury and CFLs
4. Swedish Chemical Inspection Agency: Kvicksilver i lågenergilampor och lysrör
5. “CFL Bulbs Have One Hitch: Toxic Mercury”
6. New Electric Politics – Environment
7. Mercury: A Broader Perspective, IAEEL Newsletter 3/93
8. EIA: Electric Power Monthly, September 2009
9. Life Cycle Analysis of Integral Compact Fluorescent Lamps, 1991
10. More on mercury, IAEEL Newsletter 1/94
11. Lot 19: Domestic Lighting Part 1, Chapter 4
12. Eurostat: Panorama of Energy 2007
13. Mercury Waste Solutions
14. “Think before you make the switch to CFL!”