Energy-saver bulbs carry disposal woe
Hard to recycle, bad for landfills
MECHANICSBURG, Pa. - It's a message being drummed into the heads of homeowners everywhere: Swap out those incandescent lights with longer-lasting compact fluorescent bulbs and cut your electric use.
Governments, utilities, environmentalists, and, of course, retailers everywhere are spreading the word.
Few, however, are volunteering to collect the mercury-laced bulbs for recycling - despite what public officials and others say is a potential health hazard if the hundreds of millions of them being sold are trashed and end up in landfills and incinerators.
For now, much of the nation has no real recycling network for compact fluorescent lights, or CFLs, despite the ubiquitous public relations campaigns, rebates, and giveaways encouraging people to adopt the swirly darlings of the energy-conscious movement. Recyclers and others guess that a small fraction of CFLs sold in the United States are recycled, while the majority are put out with household trash or otherwise discarded.
"In most parts of the country, it requires getting in your car and burning up your gas and going out of your way, a long ways, and people are unlikely to do this," said Paul Abernathy, the executive director of the Association of Lighting and Mercury Recyclers in Calistoga, Calif.
Sales of the bulbs have skyrocketed this decade - doubling last year to about 380 million after registering 17,000 in 2000, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Recycling efforts, though, are spotty at best. Some communities are arranging special CFL drop-off events; some city or county hazardous waste collection facilities accept them.
Swedish retailer IKEA collects the bulbs at its 34 US stores, and manufacturer Osram Sylvania offers a mail-in program.
A few governments have targeted retailers. The City of Madison, Wis., requires retailers that sell the bulbs to also collect them for recycling, although stores can charge a fee for it. Maine and Vermont fund programs that distribute collection bins to retailers and get the bulbs to recyclers, by mail or other arrangement.
Pennsylvania spent $8,000 to distribute white plastic collection buckets to several dozen businesses, community organizations, and local governments. Two such buckets are nestled among the expanding display of CFLs at Ritters True Value Hardware in the central Pennsylvania town of Mechanicsburg, looking like something a store employee inadvertently left there while cleaning up - not a fledgling attempt to collect the bulbs for safe disposal.
