Last week we passed out 19,500 CFL bulbs to our customers here in McMinnville, as a part of our conservation effort. Since then the local news paper has published two articles about CFLs with a strongly negative slant. Attached is my responce to the editor. I may also be using this to buy myself a little more time to finish the Energy 101 post:
http://www.newsregister.com/news/story.cfm?story_no=238072
http://www.newsregister.com/news/story.cfm?story_no=237176
Dear Editor,
CFLs are not a perfect light source.
As has been covered twice in the last week by your paper, they contain mercury. Mercury is an essential part of CFLs and a bulb typically contains between 1.4 and 5 milligrams.
In order to provide some context to this number: older thermometers typically contain 500 milligrams of mercury, and mechanical thermostats typically contain 1,000-3,000 mg of mercury (some of these were still available for purchase as late as December 2003).
The EPA estimates that the U.S. is responsible for the release of 104 metric tons of mercury each year. Most of these emissions come from coal-fired electrical power, and in a national energy market any hydro power we do not use in the NW can be sold to offset coal power elsewhere.
So when we say that CFLs use 75% less electricity than an incandescent, we are saying that 75% less mercury is released into the atmosphere when you use one instead of an incandescent; to the tune of 4.5 mg of mercury over the life of the CFL. Because the mercury vapor inside fluorescent light bulbs becomes bound to the inside of the light bulb as it is used, there is an average of 0.4 mg of mercury free in the bulb at the end of its life. This gives us a net total of 4.1 mg of mercury saved from the environment even in the worst case scenario where the bulb ends up in the landfill.
If all 290 million CFLs sold in 2007 were landfilled, they would add 0.1 percent to the U.S. mercury emission caused by humans. So harping on the mercury in CFLs is akin to complaining about a dripping sink when a fire hydrant is open in your front yard.
CFLs are a better environmental choice than incandescents.
Matt Deppe
B.A. Philosophy
McMinnville, OR
P.S. If a CFL falls in the forest and breaks, and no one is there to lick it, is anyone really hurt?
I ran out of room in the letter to discuss the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which mandates incandescents to be 25% more efficient then they are now by 2012 or so(mentions nothing about anything being illegal), and also has a list of exceptions longer than my arm that covers all specialty bulbs etc. I also have yet to find a legitimate and verifiable source that states that a broken CFL pose a serious health concern to anyone assuming they are not going to eat it.
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3 years ago
3 comments:
Hey, you ARE posting again. Nice.
I like the post.
As someone who's been literally studying how to get LTE's published, let me say the following, for the benefit of others if you already knew: Usually 250 words or less means it's more likely to get published. Citing previous articles or letters specifically (like you pretty much did) is always a good thing. I'd sum up the figures and "wonky" stuff into a few sentences so that the short of attention stay with you. While I like your beginning and closing sentences stylistically, my impression is that a thesis statement at the beginning is best. And the sentence about the fire hydrant and leaky faucet is LTE gold.
Then again, perhaps this was already published, and maybe they were looking for just such a response.
Yer great, Matt.
Yours rules of thumb are great. Thanks for that as well as your encouragement.
It has not been published as of yet. They wrote me saying that they would like to use it but feel they must include Mac Water & Lights name since they consider it a significant bias (my words, not theirs). So I am currently on version three, which is not completely sterile, much less fun, and full of boring facts but facts all the same. (At least they didn't see my first version which included a statement something like "oh, and if I still have a little room would you mind informing your readers that if a bulb does happen to break they should not clean it up with their tongue or feed it to their small children."
Time will tell. I'll post the final version if one ever passes. Maybe sometime next week. So much for SunTzus advice of acting quickly.
Do repost if it gets printed. They're probably going to print it as an editorial rather than an LTE, right? That would be even better. I hear that for editorials you wanna get someone else to "cosign" the letter, so that it sounds like a few important people got together to send a message to the paper.
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