Send Your Light Bulbs to Washington
Filed Under: Environmental News, Green Politics on July 26, 2009
In a true, grassroots, and fundamental way, this campaign aims to protest the federal government’s forcing us to use compact fluorescent lights (CFL). A federal law will ban the sale of traditional incandescent bulbs by 2012, effectively eliminating them from American use.
While I don’t love the old, inefficient, more-heat-than-light incandescents, I also don’t like government telling me what to do. Especially when the alternative they’re promoting (CFL) has some serious drawbacks of its own.
Although breaking a CFL in your home doesn’t necessarily mean everyone who lives there will die from mercury poisoning, it’s still a worry. Any mercury is bad and a house full of it, thanks to bulbs, smoke detectors, thermostats, and more (that all contain it), can’t be healthy. Sending these items to the landfill is, often, technically illegal too.
Further, the law will effectively ban new technologies that could be safer, cheaper, and better alternatives as well, such as the laser breakthrough I talked about in a post not too long ago.
So a grassroots campaign called Send Your Light Bulbs to Washington (click to visit the site) has started to encourage people to pack up their used CFLs and send them to your Congress-critter (Senate, House, or both) with a note explaining to them that you aren’t sure how the convoluted disposal rules work, so you’re just entrusting them to do it for you.
This is a GREAT idea and I think it could get legs quickly. Our own, unscientific experience in our house has been that CFL bulbs last twice as long as incandescents (at most). For more information on the new law and related issues, you can also read this great repost from John Stossel’s blog at this link.
Related posts:
- Dim Bulbs
- Making Incandescents As Efficient as CFLs
- Washington Post Exposes BP ties to Eco-Groups, Other Media Ignore Controversy
