Gryffn Musings

Whose stupid idea was this anyway?

You do know that you can't just throw these in your regular trash, right? You do know that you have to take them to a Collection Center that deals with mercury, right? You know that they contain toxic mercury? What happens if one breaks?

According to the EPA Mercury/CFL pages:

Never use a vacuum cleaner, broom, or put it down the drain.
Never wash clothing or other items that have come in direct contact with mercury. You must throw it away.
Um, where?

This what they say we should do:
Before cleaning up, air out the room. All people and pets should leave the room. Shut off forced-air heating/AC.
Pick up the shards with cardboard or poster board and place them in a jar and seal it with a metal lid.
Use sticky tape to get the small pieces.
Wipe the area with wet paper towels and place them into the glass jar.

Let's see what to do when a regular incandescent bulb breaks:
Sweep or vacuum up the glass. Go over the surface with a wet paper towel. Throw it all away in your regular trash.

Hmmm, which do you prefer?
Which is safer for people, pets, and the planet?

Yet we are being forced to use this polluting and inferior product.
Why? To make people like Al Gore rich?

In a word, yes.

Since mercury is such a bad pollutant, why are we supposed to use these products?

The government is pushing hard to make us use them. While some big cities may have facilities for dealing with Mercury, how do you enforce people actually taking the time to travel and responsibly dispose of old and broken CFLs?

What about the vast rural areas who only have landfills. They will be polluting the planet and growing areas – thus polluting our food supply.

For example, here is a map of Collection Centers in Iowa.

Who is really going to travel up to 150 miles to throw away CFL lights? Some places will even charge you a fee to take them.

Whose stupid idea was this anyway?

In addition to triggering seizures and migraines, in addition to requiring an entire page of EPA instructions on cleanup should you break one of these mercury-laden wonders, in addition to the lies about how long they last, in addition to the fact that they throw the most putrid of lighting, and in addition to the fact that they will be The Law in 2012 and we can’t recycle them, we now have another advantage to CFL light bulbs.  Fire Hazard.
— Build a home, work on it day and night, stick a Walmart CFL in it and burn it down

And this is what you are left to deal with when you decide to be Al Gore green. We’ve returned a lot of them and we still have these,. So it makes you wonder if you are saving any money at all by purchasing these toxic little pigs.
— Watt the CFL… Walmart’s Trying To Kill Me!

So, whose stupid idea was this anyway??