How many compact fluorescent bulbs can I safely eat?
Many folk are alarmed at the mercury content in CF lamps, mostly due to the fact they either eat the bulbs, or break the globe and lick the broken glass to clean it up (the standard hazardous materials handling method).(For the benefit of everyone, I’ll exclude accidental compact fluorescent suppository incidents).
So how many CF lamps would the Food Standards agency recommend consuming?
* Each CFL contains 4mg of mercury.
* Total permitted methylmercury intake per week is 221.1 micrograms per week for an average person over 2 years of age. (105.6 for preggies, 62.7 for infants).
The Australian standards would only recommend eating 2.8 compact fluorescents per year for the average person over 2 years of age and weighing around 67kgs. Pregnant women should restrict themselves to 1.38, and infants should only eat 0.8 bulbs per year.
Oh, and you probably shouldn’t eat fish.
Facts from here and here.
Labels: compact fluros
posted by Larry Bonewend @ 9:02 pm
7 comments
7 Comments:
landfill? you know, where most of them wind up? well bacteria/environment act on that mercury turning it into all sorts of nasty organic mercury compounds which then leach into the water table. this is something to be concerned about if we're going to have to start using more of them to increase energy efficiency. either the mercury compounds have to go or some sort of disposal system needs to be put in place.
afaik, such a system does not exist in australia. even in the us only something like 25% of bulbs are being recycled. being a green voter i assume you don't think it's ok to have another source of mercury pollution.
it's something to think about when your cfls die. we should start losing ours sometime this year i think and i have no idea where to safely dispose of them. if you do know of a means to do this please add it to your post because i don't want to have to keep them around for ages.
Compact fluorescent globes aren't an ideal solution, they're a pragmatic one.
Ideally we'd all be using LEDs, more skylights (painfully overlooked far too often), even freaking beeswax candles. That's something to strive towards, but it's far off.
I'm a Greens voter, but I don't live under a Greens government. If we ban incandescents and don't have both a CFL disposal bin at post offices, and a fridge magnet with a free waste clean-up hotline for broken globes (maybe even a requirement for the glass itself to be shielded in, say, a polycarbonate sheath, containing shards and preventing contamination), it's hypocritical.
Shielding globes in plastic would even be ideal for blocking out the infra-red interference with TV remotes - there's a selling point for all those manufacturers out there! Never risk mercury poisoning, OR lose range on your remote! I digress.
And we'd need to have a refund for dead globes - otherwise Average Joe McBinIt wouldn't bother. I digress again.
But essentially I agree, I would like to see 100% of the mercury in CFLs never reach landfill, and end up being reused. Perhaps I should be against CFLs being used by Average Joe McBinIt, until we can be assured of recycling, but then there's the mercury released from coal plants, which is only marginally worse.
For your, or my, dead CFL's, and NiCad batteries for that matter, there is only one safe disposal option - self-storage until someone that gives a shit is elected. I'll be working towards that.
funny...
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