The Dark Side Of CFLs
Wednesday, 15
April 2009 Walt McGinnis
Brian Killmore/iStockphotos.
Consider this - instead of saving the
environment, CFLs are actually destroying it. CFLs should be thought of as
toxic technology, when mercury contamination, ultraviolet radiation, and radio
frequency radiation are factored in. From cradle to grave, CFLs pose a danger
to people’s health and well being, as well as adding even more toxicity to the
environment. In fact, CFLs do not reduce a person’s carbon footprint and may
even increase it in some situations. To make matters even worse, CFLs emit
harmful levels of electromagnetic radiation.
Starting in the year 2012, regular
incandescent bulbs, the ones invented by Thomas Edison over 100 years ago, will
be banned in Canada in the pursuit of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Yet, contrary to popular belief, switching from regular bulbs to CFLs could
increase global energy consumption, not reduce it. If that alone does not shake
consumer confidence, perhaps the facts that CFLs contain mercury and also emit
electromagnetic radiation might give people a wake-up call up to the truth
about CFLs.
On the other hand, since CFL producers are
being handed a monopoly in the light bulb market by some federal government and
are being cheered on by corporatist environmental groups, sales are not about
to drop anytime soon.
It seems like the protectors of the
environment have jumped ship.
Health Canada is simply not doing its
job as they ignore the devastating impact of having millions of CFLs in our
environment. Why are they sitting by, and allowing the Canadian government to
force its citizens to use them?
To make matters even worse, groups such as
the
Suzuki Foundation
and
Greenpeace, whom Canadians have
come to rely on to protect them from environmental pollutants, have chosen to
ignore the potential looming environmental and health risks, and blindly promote
the use of CFLs.
Why have environmentalists and the
government joined in an alliance with the electrical industry in promoting an
undeniably dangerous product? Whose side are they on anyway?
Canadian
Health and Safety officials seem to be asleep at the switch, oblivious
of the hazards, and environmentalists appear to have sold out, as manufacturers
and sellers of CFLs are laughing all the way to the bank. With impunity
“los tres amigos”, the manufacturers, the corporatist environmentalist backers
and government, are leaving misled consumers to deal with the aftermath of a
potential environmental catastrophe.
Meanwhile, the New Zealand government,
citing concerns about CFLs lack of efficiency and safety, has lifted its ban on
incandescent bulbs. Hopefully other governments will see the wisdom in
this decision and follow suit.
Corporatist Environmentalists
Corporatism is the dominant ideology in
today’s western democracies. “While the corporatist society maintains a veneer
of open criticism and democracy, it squelches opposition to dominant corporate
interests by using propaganda and rhetoric to obscure facts and to deter
communication among citizens. Corporatism creates conformists who behave like
cogs in organizational hierarchies, not responsible citizens,” explains
Publishers
Weekly,
reviewing the book
Voltaire’s Bastards by John Ralston Saul.
These are just some of the attributes of the ideology that has a strangle hold
on our society and, it appears, on our major environmental groups as well.
The environment is too important to be
left solely to the environmentalists.
Environmentalists with corporatist
tendencies can cause a lot of harm when they are not properly scrutinized and
held accountable by the public. They have played a huge role in keeping consumers
in the dark regarding the hazards posed by CFLs. The
Suzuki
Foundation
and
Greenpeace claim that CFLs are
good for the environment and no one dares to challenge them.
The disinformation process begins when
public awareness of a harmful product, such as a CFL, is restricted by
environmental groups. Over time, with no real criticism of the product, a
consensus consciousness is created in the public mind that the product is
safe. Finally, in one of the oldest tricks in the book, corporations use
these groups as third party endorsers to create a favourable image of a
potentially dangerous product. Remember back in the sixties with doctors in TV
adds smoking
Camel cigarettes?
The evidence that shows that CFLs are
hazardous to humans is undeniable. The question is, why are environmental
groups willing to risk a safe environment and their reputations by promoting a
toxic product?
CFLs Are A Hazardous Product & Do Not
Save Energy
It may surprise many people to know that
CFLs increase a consumer’s carbon footprint in a ‘cradle to grave’ analysis.
Full costs to manufacture, operate and safely dispose of a CFL have never been
disclosed to the public. The reality is that residential lighting takes up only
0.8% of energy consumption in Canada.
CFLs are energy hogs to produce, operate
and dispose of. Reducing a consumer’s carbon footprint is the CFL’s raison
d’être. But before deciding to switch over to compact florescent lights
it would be wise to first review a cradle to grave analysis of the carbon footprint
of a CFL, compared to an incandescent bulb.
What is the real energy cost of a
CFL? What does it cost to mine, manufacture, package, ship, sell,
operate, dispose of CFLs on the environment? These are questions ignored by CFL
promoters.
An
International Association for Energy-Efficient Lighting
(IAEEL)
study conducted in Denmark, explored some carbon footprint factors, but not
all, showing it took 1.8 Kwh of electricity to assemble a CFL compared to 0.11
Kwh to assemble an incandescent bulb. That means it took 16 times more
energy to produce a CFL. The study did not include the fact that a CFL is much
heavier and is more dangerous to handle, and will thus cost more to package, to
ship, and to sell.
This research also did not calculate the
energy required to safely dispose of a CFL and reclaim the mercury. The cost of
removing mercury from the landfills was also not considered. More over, the
potential cost in destroyed lives, illnesses, and lost human productivity due
to exposure to mercury and electromagnetic radiation have not been considered.
If such a study could be done, and
considered all the negative contributing factors, it would show a CFL has a
massive carbon footprint, one that would dwarf a regular incandescent light
bulb and it would also show that CFLs will leave behind a wake of environmental
destruction.
CFLs Do Not Save On Energy Consumption
Power
Factor
An incandescent bulb has a power factor of 1. Most CFLs sold in Canada have a
power factor of about 0.55. That means there are about 45% more energy
losses in operating the CFL compared to an incandescent bulb. This does
not show up on a power bill but the power company has to supply about 45% more
power than what the bulb is rated for. Astonishingly, CFLs can take almost
twice as much energy to operate than what is on the label and still be listed
as an energy star product, something few consumers know. CFL cheerleaders seldom
tell consumers that the power factor is not included in their energy
consumption calculations.
Heat
Loss
Energy efficient bulbs increase greenhouse gases. Because they burn cooler,
they cause home heating costs to rise. "Lighting regulations (banning incandescent
lights) will increase GHG emissions in
Hydro’s service territory by
45,000 tons due to cross effects of a switch to cool-burning bulbs,” explained
a BC Hydro spokesperson in 2009
Vancouver Sun
article.
The ‘cross effect’ referred to is the loss
of heat from hotter incandescent bulbs when we switch over to cooler burning
CFLs. When a 60watt regular bulb is replaced with a 15 watt CFL, 45watts
of heat from inside a house is lost. If that is repeated 20 times, 900watts of
lost heat now has to be provided for from another source.
To make up for the lost heat consumers
have to turn up electric heating, or worse still, turning up their oil or gas
furnace which will leave them consuming even more energy and creating more
greenhouse gases than before they made the switch. In the summertime,
because of longer natural daytime light, both lighting and heating are used
much less. In the wintertime power consumption will rise as lights go on but
additional substitution heat is required to compensate for less heat from the
CFLs.
Considering the lower power factor as well
as the heating losses, it can be concluded that using CFL will not reduce a
consumer’s carbon footprint when compared to a regular light bulb. Moreover,
instead of saving energy there is good evidence demonstrating that using CFLs
will increase the user’s carbon footprint.
CFLs Are Power Dumb
Lighting is a fraction of overall energy
consumption and has a limited potential for energy savings. Nevertheless,
North Americans should be conserving wherever possible. At the same time,
people should not forget that switching incandescent bulbs to CFLs poses a
whole range of negative environmental and health impacts with very little, if
any, energy savings
An electric hot water
tank consumes five times as much electricity as residential lighting.
To put lighting energy consumption into
perspective, the Sector
Sustainability Table listed in the
Government
of Canada
website reports that “Homes consume 16% of all the energy used in Canada,
with lighting using 5% of that figure. Residential lighting therefore
represents 0.8% of the total energy consumption in Canada. This means that
Canadians are spending millions of dollars on CFLs in a fruitless effort to
reduce a fraction of their energy consumption.”
It would be much ‘power smarter’ to focus
on residential water heating than light bulbs. An electric hot water tank
consumes five times as much electricity as residential lighting. If hot water
heating was made 10% more efficient by using inexpensive technology already
available, Canadians would save more energy than the most wildly optimistic
predictions of savings by CFL promoters. It would be cheaper, simpler, and have
no detrimental environmental effects.
CFLs Are Mercury Polluters
More than 98% of used CFLs end up in
landfills each year. That is 675 million for the year 2007 according to the
National
Geographic Society. Each CFL contains about 5 milligrams of
elemental mercury as well as other poisonous gases. When mercury enters
water sources, biological processes change the chemical form to methylmercury
which is the organic, more toxic form found in fish. Methylmercury
bio-accumulates through the food chain and once in the body can affect
developing fetuses, children and adult nervous systems.
Methylmercury will not stay in landfills
as it easily gets transported through the water table. Throwing CFLs into
landfills will contaminate the soil, the water table and eventually the air.
More than 60,000 children are born each
year in the United States with neurodevelopment impairments caused by exposure
in the womb to methylmercury compounds, according to new estimates by an expert
panel convened by the National Academy of Science’s Year 2000.
Beware of a broken CFL, as each broken
lamp should be considered similar to a toxic spill and care needs to be taken
cleaning them up. The manufacturing of CFLs also exposes workers to toxic
levels of mercury. CFLs are manufactured mostly in China with virtually no
health, safety, or environmental protection regulations. Ironically, most
of the electricity used to manufacture CFLs comes from coal-fired generators.
As CFLs increase in popularity, mercury exposure to workers, to electricians,
to maintenance personal, to consumers, to water supplies, and to the living
environment, will go ahead almost unchecked.
How many resources and pollutants does
it take to make a light bulb?
“The reality is, even
energy-efficient products don’t always come from energy-efficient
beginnings. Consider for a second what goes into producing, powering and
transporting products around the world like...energy efficient light bulbs.
Until they are manufactured in a carbon-neutral way, transported on
low-emission vehicles and powered in our homes by cleaner energy—green products
will never be as green as they can be,” explained the
World
Wild Life Fund
in
MacLean’s Magazine.
Many environmentalists ignore these facts and instead claim that CFLs put less
mercury into the environment than what would have been created via a smoke
stack to generate the additional electricity needed for regular light
bulbs. This is not true. Not all electricity is generated by dirty
coal-fired plants. Even if it was, this would still be an irrelevant point
given that coal fired power plants could operate with 80% less mercury
emissions. In any event, it does not apply to BC where 90% of electrical power
comes from hydroelectric dams according to
BC
Hydro.
In Canada, 58% of electrical generation is from hydro and 19% from coal,
according to
Industry Canada.
CFLs Are Electro-Polluters
CFLs emit electromagnetic radiation, a
type of energy that can make people very sick. Many people have reported skin
rashes and irritation due to ultra-violet (UV) radiation. Radio frequency
radiation is even more of a concern. The effects of exposure to radio
frequency radiation, as well as to high voltage spikes and transients, are
known to cause illness, are virtually ignored by environmental groups and green
building consultants alike.
There has been a ‘rash’ of health
problems associated with exposure to electromagnetic radiation such as that
emitted by CFLs.
In Sweden, according to polls, up to
290,000 people, or more than 3% of the population, have reported suffering
symptoms of EHS when exposed to electromagnetic radiation. Symptoms range
from joint stiffness, chronic fatigue, headaches, tinnitus, respiratory,
gastric, skin, sleep and memory problems, depressive tendencies, to Alzheimer’s
disease and all classes of cancer.
Hope For The Future
Other than the
World
Wildlife Fund, almost all the major environmental groups have not
informed the public about the dark side of CFLs. Why they behave as they do is
unknown but promoting CFLs could potentially diminish these groups credibility
when the facts become apparent.
Hopefully, other governments will wake up
to the shortcomings of CFLs, and follow the New Zealand government’s example
and change their policies on banning incandescent lights due to concerns about
safety and energy efficiency of the CFLs. Germany has already restricted the
use of fluorescent lighting in public places and has banned fluorescent lights
in hospitals perhaps showing that this issue is too great to be shrugged off
and ignored. North America appears to be headed in the opposite direction and
the Canadian Federal government still plans to ban all incandescent lights
before year 2012.
There are incandescent light bulbs on the
market right now that last longer than CFLs and are 80% more efficient than a
regular bulb. In 2010, surprisingly, just as the market gets saturated
with CFLs,
General Electric is coming out with a
new high efficiency incandescent bulb. They claim it will be twice as efficient
as a regular bulb.
If they live up to their claims these new
incandescent lights will rival CFLs for energy consumption, but will not have
all the other environmental problems. Then another buying craze will begin and
CFLs may begin to be phased out, leaving behind a long-term problem of mercury
disposal, remediation, and an untold toll on human health.
In the meantime, the best way for you to
reduce your carbon footprint is to follow your mother’s advice and turn the
lights off when you leave the room.
Walt
McGinnis is a Licensed Electrician and an Electromagnetic Radiation Tester and
a member of the EM Radiation Task Force, living on Vancouver Island, Canada.
Visit: http://www.mcginniselectric.ca/
Source: http://www.greenmuze.com/blogs/guest-bloggers/1031-the-dark-side-of-cfls.html