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From the archives:
This commentary originally appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press on May 10, 2007.
I did my part for the environment the other day: I persuaded a young woman to reshelf half a shopping cart of compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) she intended to purchase. She was out to help the environment, but when she discovered that CFLs contain mercury, she did what an intelligent person should do: She decided to do some research before bringing those environmental Trojan horses into her home.
Compact fluorescent bulbs are the pigtail-shaped light bulbs that Al Gore and a phalanx of environmental groups, home improvement retailers, and the Environmental Protection Agency are pushing like Eric Estrada shilling retirement property in Arkansas. CFLs are going to save the planet from the grip of global warming. They use less energy than a standard light bulb, which means coal-burning power plants spew less greenhouse gas into the air.
Compact fluorescents cost four to six times as much as a standard bulb, but in terms of energy savings, they pay for themselves in a little over a year. I'm looking at a 60-watt replacement bulb that promises to save me $45 over its seven-year life.
Unless I accidentally drop it.
 The case de jour involves one Brandy Bridges of Prospect, Maine. According to an article in the Ellsworth American, Bridges dropped one of about two dozen bulbs she was installing in her home. It shattered on the shag carpeting and a bag of toys in her 7-year-old daughter's room.
Fortunately aware of the toxic affects of mercury, Bridges called Home Depot, where she had bought the bulbs. Home Depot warned her not to vacuum the glass and directed her to a poison control hotline, which in turn referred her to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Environmental Protection. The DEP sent a specialist to test the mercury vapor levels in her home. In her daughter's room near the broken bulb the mercury level was in excess of six times the EPA standard.
The kicker: The DEP specialist told Bridges not to clean up the glass herself, but to call an environmental clean-up firm. The firm gave Bridges an estimate of $2,000 to clean up the broken bulb. That doesn't include the cost of the carpeting, which would have to be pulled up and disposed of in an environmentally safe manner.
Among others, Steve Milloy, publisher of JunkScience.com, has jumped on the Bridges' story. It seems strange to Milloy that environmentalists favor CFLs, which for the foreseeable future will be made with mercury. When Gore says every American family should replace its incandescent bulbs with CFLs, we're talking more than 5 billion sockets, Milloy writes. Think about all the light bulbs you've broken in your lifetime -- 5 billion bulbs present a heckuva potential for "hazardous waste sites" like Bridge's daughter's bedroom.
And, notes Milloy, we haven't seriously taken into account disposal of all these bulbs once they burn out. If handled properly, the mercury can be recycled. But proper handling requires consumers to make the effort. At the Maine safety standard of 300 nanograms per cubic meter (a really tiny amount of mercury) it would take 16,667 cubic meters of soil to contain the mercury in one CFL (that's a lot of dirt) that winds up in a landfill.
The cheap shot here is obvious. Once again, as happened with the push for energy independence through ethanol, we have a bunch of social activists with an agenda and corporate concerns looking for government to give them a market edge by pushing a solution without having thought through the consequences. We also have something more.
The not-so-cheap shot is the not-so-gradual-anymore transition of government from an elected body charged with protecting individual citizens to a body-for-rent to push social agendas.
Mercury is terrible when it belches from the smokestack of a coal-powered electric plant, but it's virtually irrelevant when the EPA awards Energy Star status to mercury-based light bulbs? Mercury is bad in fish we eat, but was OK in vaccines we inject into young children and pregnant women? Mercury waste from dental offices is environmentally bad, but nobody openly questions its effect in our mouths for 20 or 30 years? It's not the mercury, stupid -- it's who has the clout that counts.
The light bulb that should pop on here, if it hasn't already, is that we can't trust government to put our individual safety first when concocting public policy. Since the Brandy Bridges story hit the Internet, the Maine DEP has backed off its recommendation for professional clean-up of a broken CFL, but it has issued a list of safety precautions that goes well beyond the cursing and grabbing a broom or the vacuum that go into cleaning up a broken incandescent bulb. There's more going on here than a simple tradeoff of precaution for energy efficiency. The point is, nobody in government gave much thought to the very likely event of somebody dropping and breaking a glass bulb filled with mercury vapor.
Perhaps, after thinking twice, the woman at Menard's will go back and buy a cartload of compact fluorescent lights -- but perhaps not. At least she'll have done what government officials should have done but failed to do -- look past the social agenda at potential consequences. Caveat emptor. |
