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Mercury:
Is it still evil?
I was not around when lead in paint was a good idea.
MTBE gas additive never made sense to me.
Now it’s Mercury from Environmentally Correct Compact Florescent Lights.
Worse is the 500 to 800 tons of Mercury emitted each year processing
gold for jewelry.
What the
EPA is not telling you about Compact Florescent Lights (CFLs) could be
harmful to pregnant women and children.
Most CFLs
contain mercury. If not Mercury, they contain other evil heavy
metals.
The Country
did a great job reducing Mercury emissions during the ‘90’s. Between
1990 and 1999 the U.S. Emissions of Human-Caused Mercury went down from
220 tons to 115 tons per year. Now it’s environmentally correct to
promote and sell CFLs and not make consumer aware that most CFLs contain
mercury, the safe cleanup precautions and how to dispose of CFLs
properly.
The EPA guidelines on what to do if you break a
CFL.
Disposing
of CFLs is easy. Put the burned out lights in a bag next to your new
lights. (Put your used batteries in the same bag.) Twice a year when
your City has its Hazardous Waste Day, go to 10 neighbors. Ask them if
you can take their burned out CFLs. Your neighbor will either say
“Thanks” or “No”. If they say “No” it for one of three reasons:
1) They
don’t use CFLs, 2) They don’t have any burned out CFLs, or 3) They
didn’t know that they were hazardous waste. You can help on 2 of the 3.
The
combined amount of mercury in CFLs is only a few tons. The total amount
of mercury emitted by coal-fired electrical plants in 1999 was only 50
tons. According to the UNEP, the third-world gold processing industry
emits 650 to 1,000 tons of mercury into the air each year.
If you want
to turn a redneck into an environmentalist, tell him buying gold jewelry
for his wife is environmentally incorrect.
Environmental Correctness
The “environmental correctness” for CFLs comes from an EPA report that
says powering a CFL from a coal-powered electrical plant would generate
3.3 mgs of Mercury where a incandescent light would generate 13.3 mgs of
Mercury.
That correctness supersedes notifying the consumers that most CFLs
contain Mercury, how to clean-up a broken CFL and how to properly
recycle a CFL.
Please
understand
Mercury is the only element that evaporates and sinks to the bottom of a
lake.
It requires 1/70th of a teaspoon of Mercury to contaminate a
25 acre lake to the point that the fish are non-eatable (Union of
Concerned Scientists).
That’s about 200 Compact Florescent Lights.
Wal-Mart is committed to 100,000,000. That’s 500,000 25 acre lakes.
There is good Mercury and bad Mercury.
Good becomes bad when it enters a lake, river, stream or ocean.
Either
quit complaining about coal electrical plants or start complaining about
Gold. Our "want" for gold puts 10 to 15 times as much mercury into
the atmosphere each year as do our coal electric plants.
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