So now people are finding out that CFL’s contain Mercury, about 5mg per bulb. Enough to contaminate 6,000 gallons of drinking water beyond safe levels! WTF! If these are so great why is the Gov’t mandating we all buy them??? Thank you “green people” !!! There is an 11 step process just to get rid of them, practically a haz-mat situation. No Thank you, I will stick with my “old school” bulbs.
It’s a tradeoff. The largest source of mercury as a pollutant comes courtesy of coal power plants. If you use CFLs and thus use far less electricity, that’s less coal burned and less mercury into the atmosphere. Does it equal out? I dunno, and it will depend where your power comes from – around here, it’s coal, so maybe. Yours may be nuke, hydro, whatever.
FWIW, from Pop Mechanics (http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/home_journal_news/4217864.html)
About 50 percent of the electricity produced in the U.S. is generated by coal-fired power plants. When coal burns to produce electricity, mercury naturally contained in the coal releases into the air. In 2006, coal-fired power plants produced 1,971 billion kilowatt hours (kwh) of electricity, emitting 50.7 tons of mercury into the air—the equivalent amount of mercury contained in more than 9 billion CFLs (the bulbs emit zero mercury when in use or being handled).
Approximately 0.0234 mg of mercury—plus carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide—releases into the air per 1 kwh of electricity that a coal-fired power plant generates. Over the 7500-hour average range of one CFL, then, a plant will emit 13.16 mg of mercury to sustain a 75-watt incandescent bulb but only 3.51 mg of mercury to sustain a 20-watt CFL (the lightning equivalent of a 75-watt traditional bulb). Even if the mercury contained in a CFL was directly released into the atmosphere, an incandescent would still contribute 4.65 more milligrams of mercury into the environment over its lifetime.
"Even if the mercury contained in a CFL was directly released into the atmosphere, an incandescent would still contribute 4.65 more milligrams of mercury into the environment over its lifetime. "
“Phfft! Facts. You can use them to prove anything.”
– Homer Simpson