Living Like Ed - (Page 41) future of that? So utility companies are really on board with saving power, not creating more and more demand from their customers. The CFL Naysayers Granted, there are people who look at CFLs and see problems. The mercury content, the quality of light—I’ve heard them all, even from my wife. These people are more comfortable with the old technology that they’re used to, and they don’t want to give it up. I understand that, but it’s shortsighted thinking. So let me address a couple of the issues people raise surrounding compact fluorescent lightbulbs. 1. Toxic elements in CFLs. There’s an environmental cost to everything. Look at my mountain bike. The plating processes used to create it are toxic. It has rubber tires. Energy was used both to fabricate the mountain bike and to ship it to me. But if you look at the life cycle of that bike, the amount of energy that I’m using by riding that bike around fueled by an ear of corn or a bowl of rice (human fuel, rather than fossil fuel), as opposed to what I’d use getting around in an automobile, there’s no contest. I hope that everybody would agree with that. It’s the same with a compact fluorescent lightbulb. CFLs do contain toxic elements. There’s a bit of mercury in some of them, although manufacturers have been working to reduce this substantially, and some have a bit of lead in the switch, as well. But these are very small amounts, extremely small. They must be disposed of responsibly and cannot go into a landfill. But having said that, there’s far more mercury coming out of the smokestack of a power plant that’s generating electricity to power a standard incandescent lightbulb than there is in a low-energy-usage CFL. If you dispose of CFLs properly, the amount of energy that you’re saving—the amount of coal that won’t be burned at a power plant, of mercury that won’t be going out that power plant’s smokestacks— 41 1: home newspaper recycling programs. If you want to save a sizable amount on your heating and
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