Are we screwing in the wrong bulbs?

Despite what we’re told, research on mercury poses an awkward question

By Nick Budnick

Pamplin Media Group, Sep 11, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (12 Reader comments)

ANNI TRACY / PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP

When it comes to light bulbs, the message has been blindingly clear. Environmentalists, energy experts, government agencies and pretty much everyone but the pope all say it’s high time you replaced your old incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs, or CFLs. Last year, Congress passed a law banning incandescents by 2014.

The long-lasting CFLs generate the same amount of light with less energy, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions and saving you money at the same time — and if you haven’t heard this pitch, it may be time for fresh batteries in your hearing aid.

Away from the glowing spotlight, however, a rising number of environmentally minded folks say the War on Bulbs is being waged with false or incomplete information by groups who ought to know better.

Specifically, these green skeptics say the mercury hazards of CFLs have been downplayed in the name of energy conservation.

While few say CFLs should be banned, new research highlights a stark contradiction between two cherished green goals: fighting global warming and ridding the environment of toxic pollution.

This dilemma puts conservationists in a bind. How do they warn consumers about the hazards of mercury, while at the same time promoting CFLs as a weapon against climate change?

“Energy is an important issue, and we need to get serious about conservation. But using fluorescent lamps is not a simple question,” says John Gilkeson, a principal planner with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency who is considered a national expert on mercury. “This is a very politically charged issue. Everybody’s got an agenda: it’s money, it’s energy, or it’s whatever.”

When it comes to informing the public, many government agencies haven’t figured out how to balance the different agendas, says Deborah Rice, a mercury expert at the Maine Center for Disease Control who headed an EPA panel on environmental toxicology.

“The folks I talk to in other states are struggling with it,” she says. “You’re almost in a position of saying, ‘Yeah, you’re taking on some personal risk, but it’s better for everybody.’ ”

In the 1990s, government agencies, under pressure from enviros, launched a campaign against mercury based on studies showing the toxic metal can trigger mental retardation.

As the U.S. National Institutes of Health puts it, “Exposures to very small amounts of (mercury) can result in devastating neurological damage and death.”

Mercury thermometers? Gone. Mercury switches? Off. Mercury fillings? Bite your tongue.

Now, however, those same groups are uniting behind a light bulb that contains tiny amounts of — you guessed it — mercury.

What happened? First and foremost, the American public woke up to the inconvenient fact that global temperatures have been steadily rising. Faced with the possibility of planetary catastrophe, issues like energy conservation took on new urgency.

CFLs are a good illustration of how anxiety about global warming has pushed other environmental concerns, such as toxic risks, out of the limelight.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, has joined with the U.S. Department of Energy in an energy efficiency program called Energy Star that promotes CFLs.

But its promotional campaign makes scant mention that the bulbs contain mercury and should be properly recycled. “There were (some) people in … the EPA that were very upset about it,” Gilkeson says.

Exactly how big is the risk of mercury in CFLs? And in what way is their marketing disingenuous? Here are four questionable statements often made by CFL proponents.

1) The mercury in CFLs is not enough to hurt you.

CFL advocates say each bulb contains less than 5 milligrams of mercury — less than the tip of a ballpoint pen.

While that much is true, a recent study by the state of Maine found that the mercury vapor released by a broken bulb is enough to pose a health hazard if the room is not evacuated and aired out for 15 minutes.

Rice, who assisted with the study, says that while a single exposure isn’t much of a danger, you don’t want children sniffing around the breakage. The real concern, she says, would be with families who break several bulbs in a room over a couple of years — and, unaware of the dangers, don’t clean up properly.

Then there is the issue of long-term mercury exposure. Most CFLs are thrown in the trash and wind up in a landfill. Once fractured, the metallic mercury they contain eventually will be transformed by bacteria into the more dangerous methyl mercury. That’s the kind that contaminates water, climbs the food chain, poisons fish and accumulates in the human fetus. This explains why many states (though not Oregon) ban dumping CFLs in your trash, instead treating them as hazardous waste.

Michael Read, a Milwaukie sanitation district official and former president of the national Water Environment Federation, calls the mass dumping of bulbs into landfills “a potential environmental nightmare.”

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