Rosio Pavoris

The CFL mercury nightmare

How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent light bulb? About US$4.28 for the bulb and labour — unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about US$2,004.28, which doesn’t include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health.

CFL being those coily bulbs some places are making their citizens use now (and in the future; I seem to recall the EU will be moving towards them as well).

The problem is that the CFL bulbs contain some mercury, and the woman called in an environmental clean-up firm. A bit of an overreaction (PDF warning; page 2 has what you’re looking for), but kudos to that lady for not taking any chances, I guess.
The rest of that article, though, is basic right-wing scaremongering over that mercury, claiming it constitutes a pollution time-bomb and, of course, calling environmentalists hypocrites.

I don’t know why I keep expecting journalists to check their sources. I really don’t. Clearly I’m an idealist.
It took about half a second to find this graph, on Wikipedia.

So yes, mercury is a dangerous substance, and there is a slightly more localised threat of contamination with those new bulbs, but the new bulbs are sturdier than the old ones and quite hard to break anyway. People will need to be a bit more careful about disposing of them (though the bit about it “tak[ing] 16,667 cubic meters of soil to “safely” contain all the mercury in a single CFL” doesn’t take into account that those are in regards to places used for living or growing food, which landfills don’t tend to be, and the article conveniently fails to mention that the older types of fluorescent bulbs and tubes, which are widely used pretty much everywhere, contain much, much more mercury), and perhaps getting a new subdivision of 911 to deal with this sort of thing at little cost to the individual (or just expanded insurance policies, of course) would be a good idea, but come on.
The new bulbs aren’t perfect, but they’re definitely an improvement. This article is just misleading bullshit.

The National Post (of which the Financial Post is a part) is a Canadian newspaper. They’re supposed to be better than this, even if they were founded to counter an “over-liberalizing” of Canadu’s newspapers.

(Incidentally, regarding the guy who wrote that article:

Steven J. Milloy is the “Junk Science” commentator for FoxNews.com and runs the website Junkscience.com, which is dedicated to debunking what he alleges to be false claims regarding global warming, DDT, breast implants, passive smoking, ozone depletion, and mad cow disease, among other topics

Just saying.)

(Via Slashdot, obviously.)