Florescent Lights – The Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of Conservation
2 Comments Published by DanM July 2nd, 2009 in Color Country Information, Personal Conservation.Want to know where to recycle your bulbs here in Color Country? Here’s the details.
Ads all over TV urge you to “go green” and replace all of your old fashioned incandescent bulbs with cost-saving florescent bulbs. They use up to 75 percent less energy and last 10,000 hours or more – five times as long as incandescent bulbs. Businesses and lots of homes have been using foorescent tubes for years for exactly those same reasons.
But when one does burn out, don’t just throw it in the trash! This isn’t just a matter of recycling. This is a matter of poisoning the environment.
To get the great benefits of florescent lights, they have to use mercury … a dangerous environmental poison … to make them. It’s against the law to throw those lights in a landfill in seven states (California, Minnesota, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin – What about Utah? Utah’s Cowboy Legislature, remember? According to them, the land is there to be used … up.) Incinerating it is even worse. That just evenly disperses the poisonous mercury throughout the environment.
There is no safe level of mercury contamination, and it can cause “poor performance on neurobehavioral tasks, such as those measuring attention, fine motor function, language skills, visual-spatial abilities and verbal memory.” (Sound like your kids?) Because mercury in the environment builds up in fish tissues, it’s a leading cause of fish too contaminated to eat.
In fact, it’s bad enough that you should take special precautions if you happen to break one. You can read all about how to clean up a broken florescent light in this EPA document:
So … Don’t throw that florescent light away!
What should you do?
Two stores here in Color Country will accept unbroken florescent bulbs for recycling.
Home Depot
725 W Telegraph St
Washington, UT 84780
Hurst Ace Hardware
160 N Bluff St
Saint George, UT 84770
The Ace in Hurricane and Lowes will not, however. So buy your new florescent lights at the two fine stores above when you drop the old ones off.
How did you find out where to recycle florescent lights in Springdale? I want to know so I can find out where to recycle them here, where I live.
I used Bing to search for “recycle florescent”. I found several articles that suggested that Home Depot and ACE would recycle them. To verify my information, I called them on the phone. (I discovered that the ACE in Hurricane and Lowes DO NOT recycle them this way.) There aren’t that many places that are likely candidates.