I have a bone to pick with Al Gore. Yes, I saw his movie, yes I was scared, yes I've been doing my part to solve climate change every since. Just like any other green tinged American I took his number one advice, and began to use compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs in my home. Until now.
Last Friday, I was unscrewing one of those modern looking twisty CFL lightbulbs when it did what many lightbulbs have done before. It broke. In my hand. Over my head. It was at this point that some distant memory of a news story flashed through my brain- mercury my brain murmured to me. Mercury, I thought as I stopped breathing, doing my best to hold my breath until I could exit the room.
My news savvy instincts proved correct and sure enough, and after a quick Google search- mercury was all I thought of for days. You see, those new CFL lightbulbs Al and his climate friendly buddies are pushing onto the public have vaporized mercury suspended within them, and when the bulbs break these odorless colorless invisible droplets of heavy metal burst into the environment and settle, tainting whatever they land on. Now picture me with my hand holding the lightbulb- over my head.
I wanted to share a few cheery highlights I found from the EPA website entitled "Cleaning Up A Broken CFL" http://www.epa.gov/cfl/cflcleanup.html.
#1 Open a window and leave the room for 15 minutes or more. Shut off the central forced-air heating/air conditioning system, if you have one.
# 2 Have people and pets leave the room, and don't let anyone walk through the breakage area on their way out.
# 3 If clothing or bedding materials come in direct contact with broken glass or mercury-containing powder from inside the bulb that may stick to the fabric, the clothing or bedding should be thrown away. Do not wash such clothing or bedding because mercury fragments in the clothing may contaminate the machine and/or pollute sewage.
Now, if these tidbits aren't a sell on why you should keep CFLs near your women and children, I don't know what is! I realized as I read this website, that in my choosing to use CFL lightbulbs, I purposely put myself in harms way. Sure, CFL lightbulbs are better for climate change, but what about my unborn children? Mercury, like other heavy metals, is stored in your fatty tissue- and never, that's right never goes away. Aside from the gore of mercury poisoning after sufficient accumulation, there is also the possibility of serious birth defects due to high amounts of mercury in the mother's body.
So, Al, were you weighing the possibility that someday, one of those lightbulbs might break? Or, more practically, that many of them would indeed break, putting millions of people at serious risk in their own home? My major question is to you- why, when there are so many ways to save energy, would you push this one, dangerous alternative as the first thing people should do to stop climate change? Because of your advice, my partner and I spent the weekend calculating how to clean our space without further contaminating other areas. Because of your advice I threw out some of my favorite cloths that, when the bulb exploded in my hand, were irreparably laced with mercury. Because of your advice I now further worry that if I do choose to have kids (a hard enough choice in and of itself) they have a higher chance of a major birth defect due to my body's exposure to mercury.
Al, I will never buy another CFL until there is nothing to fear about them except the minor chance of some innocuous broken glass. Until that day, I'm going to fight climate change the old fashion- by simply turning my lights off more often.
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