Now more than ever, consumers seek to take steps to reduce the environmental impact of their day-to-day lives. More and more, the nation’s streets are filling with bicycles and hybrid cars, people are aiming for local and eco-friendly meats and produce, and homes are being built with a closer eye toward walkability and energy efficiency. And certainly, one of the easiest and most popular green changes made by the average consumer is the switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs, or CFLs.

CFLs, which pass an electrical current through mercury vapor suspended within their bulbs to create light, consume far less energy than traditional bulbs, which instead rely on the resistance of a filament for illumination. But concerns about disposal have always followed CFLs because of their mercury content. Mercury, a heavy metal that is especially toxic in a vaporous form, causes a variety of problems in the body, and has been responsible for some of the most prolific industrial poisonings in history.

Compounding this problem is the fact that safe CFL disposal efforts have simply not kept pace with the acceleration in demand for compact fluorescents over the past few years. Though just 17,000 of the compact bulbs were in use in 2000, there are now over 380 million providing illumination to homes across America. Unfortunately, disposal centers are few and far between, and mail-in programs, while expanding, are not as widely used as they should be.

So is all this mercury cause for concern? A recent AP article investigated the problem, and found that, although the CFLs sold last year contain a total of nearly two tons of mercury, they still represented a net mercury decrease over traditional bulbs. How? Because so much of America’s power comes from coal, and coal-fired power plants are responsible for about 65% of the world’s mercury pollution.

In fact, the article found that because so much of the extra energy required to power incandescent lights comes from coal plants, mercury pollution from traditional bulbs outstripped that of CFLs by nearly 4:1. "People should care about mercury and if they do, they should be working to save energy wherever they can and CFLs are a great answer to that," said John Rogers, a senior energy analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Cambridge, MA based advocacy group.

CFL manufacturers are also consistently working to create a better, safer product. While one of the world’s largest companies, GE, is researching newer, lower-mercury CFLs, other firms are attacking a variety of other CFL issues, such as a shorter “warm-up” time and dimmer-switch compatibility. Though CFLs are already a clear environmental favorite, the future only holds further refinement for the technology.

Photo by Tiago Daniel