Mercury in CFLs

[musht]

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[*]You can easily recycle them for free if you wanted to! OK this may not be true if you live in the Outer Hebrides but in the vast majority of cases it is. If you don't know where your local collection facility is phone your council and ask.

 

 

Dispose would be better phrase than recycle. Standard fluro tubes can go through a lamp crusher that does a pretty good job of seperating glass, metals and phosphors.

 

Lot of UK electrical waste is shipped to China, strange effect of importing so much stuff from Far East is that there is a lot of nearly empty container ships heading back that way so freight costs are minimal.

 

Re-cycling China style can involve people working over hot plates pulling useable components from PCBs whilst breathing in the solder fumes.

 

Circuit boards and plastics etc are piled up and burnt in the open air after being stripped of useables.

 

CFLs with built in ballasts are less than enviromentally friendly, got to question why lamps with seperate ballast socket , like PL, are not getting pushed?

 

Domestic lighting load is minimal compared against commercial lighting load, but commercial users want tax breaks not tax increases for changing. When were you last in a daylit supermarket?

[Tomo]

CFLs are almost impossible to recycle - next time you have a dead one, take it to bits (don't break the glass), and have a look at the inside of the base.

- Lots of plastic, a PCB, some capacitors and other silicon. On death, the cap has usually burst making it useless and a contaminant.

 

They also don't last anywhere near as long as the hype (10,000 hours? LEDs don't do that!), are much dimmer than the supposed equivalent tungsten and have horrible colour rendition.

 

Compare this to a standard tungsten bubble, which uses almost no materials:

- A few grams of glass (easily recycled using a crusher), and a minute amount of tungsten, thermoset plastic and steel.

 

Even if it's not recycled, a crushed tungsten lightbulb takes up almost no space at all - compare that to a crushed CFL...

 

All in all, CFLs with built-in ballast are pure hype and have no real benefits.

 

On the other hand, CFLs with a separate ballast could be good.

It's a shame almost nobody does them.