Australia announced that incandescent light bulbs will not meet their new energy efficiency standards and will be phased out in three years. Only florescent light bulbs will be for sale at that time.
Federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull this morning announced standard incandescent light bulbs would be phased out within three years in a bid to reduce energy consumption.
“We are introducing new energy efficiency standards and these old lights simply won’t comply, they will be phased out and basically over a period of time they will no longer be for sale,” Mr Turnbull said.
The question, why can’t the United States do something similar?
Florescent light bulbs use about 23% of the energy that a standard incandescent light bulb will use and they last about seven years. Australia estimated the effect of the switch.
Federal Government figures suggest energy used for household lighting in Australia contributes up to 12 percent of coal-energy greenhouse gas emissions and around 25 per cent of emissions from commercial and public lighting.
It is felt the change to fluorescent lighting could cut greenhouse gas emissions by the order of 800,000 tonnes a year by 2012.
The pricing here is very different, instead of a dollar or two for a four pack, florescent lights are about eight dollars each. While there are current cost savings on energy and the actual life of the light bulb, I would imagine that costs will decrease with the increased volume if we were to do something similar here in the United States.
to the mercury problem with these bulbs?
I wasn’t aware of the issue, thanks. I’ll read up on it, hopefully it’s being addressed.
But that’s probably not really an answer, you are counting on everyone to recycle and that’s not going to happen. Another article about recycling issues.
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But here is an interesting bit of information:
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Via [Treehugger.com
http://www.treehugge…]
From Treehugger
but there is an answer:
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* you recycle the bulbs
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* you set low-mercury standards for bulbs and/or sponsor or initiate low-mercury-CFL R&D (perhaps along the lines of the so-called golden carrot energy-efficiency program, only for mercury efficiency)
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* you do not forget that the environmental and health impact of the bulbs, mercury and all, is less than that of the generation of electricity they will avoid over their lives.
If these bulbs last seven years, instead of six months then if there is recycling (not that everyone will recycle) what is the impact against our currently system of producing electricity (via burning coal). Will mercury decrease? I say that based on some of these reports that it will.
at present, I’m not aware of any community in MA that accepts these bulbs for curbside recycling. And if you have to drive them to a special transfer station, obviously nobody will do it and we’ll end up with a lot of mercury in the landfills.
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Another problem: just tossing light bulbs in a recycling bin won’t work, because obviously they will break more often than not, which means the mercury is released before it ever gets to the recycling station.
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No doubt there are solutions, but AFAIK they don’t really exist yet.
There are many hardware stores that take the bulbs back. Makes it very convenient to bring the old one into the store to recycle as I purchase a new one.
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Also, Chap. 190 of MGL will have an effect (see below.)
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Finally, there is NO perfect solution but CFLs dramatically reduce the amount of mercury in the system. LEDs are slowly gaining popularity and as the price comes down will offer similar if not better savings than CFLs.
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CFL disposal impacted by mercury bill
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On July 28, (2006) Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney signed Chapter 190 Mercury Management Bill, previously HB 5112, setting guidelines and goals to reduce the expulsion of mercury into the environment through improper disposal. The bill requires manufacturers to develop, implement, and market recycling programs for mercury added product disposal, including compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs. If the manufacturer fails to achieve the set recycling goals, they will be required to pay up to $1,000,000 per year of non-compliance to the Department of Environmental Protection. Money raised from these fines will be used as grants to municipalities or regional authorities to facilitate meeting recycling rates. Read the entire Chapter 190 for more information.
The lightbulb industry will just leave the state that overregulates.. as do other industries. They don’t have to sell their product here. Just ask Allstate.
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Passing laws to try to force compliance just creates a black market in older products and a resistance by everyone to concur.
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The better system is to use education and a slow evolution. Show people why its better and let them choose to go that way.
Yeah — oxycontin, bookmaking, and light bulbs. I can see it now, a khaki and plaid dressed suburbanite passing an envelope to a shady character in an envelope for a couple of incandescent bulbs.
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Get over it. I agree that a ban isn’t the best course of action, but it’s not as if stores will stop selling CF bulbs. In fact, if we legislate in tandem with California, I guarantee you there’ll be a market — CA’s economy is bigger than something like all but 7 nations.
And if it’s a choice between hiring an electrician to rewire half your house to install ugly light fixtures that make people look like they have hepatitis, and driving to New Hampshire every couple of months, guess which choice will win–overwhelmingly?
Few people are in that position. Most people’s lighting includes lamps (no electrician required), sconces or fixtures with covers (no electrician required), and recessed lighting (no electrician required).
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Some people have some fixtures that don’t play well with CF. But, numerically, it just isn’t that many. And, it’s not a black market if you go to NH — it’s a bit more like smuggling. So, let those folks go to NH. Over time, their numbers will dwindle because stores won’t sell new fixtures that require incandescents.
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RE CA: the point is that as more and more markets require CF, you’ll see more and more CF choices. CA is the 800 pound gorilla, and they can drive this change by themselves: we can just go along for the ride.
…not to break them.
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/tic (tongue in cheek)
Is also proposing a ban on incandescent bulbs. There’s been pretty decent news coverage of this, but here’s a Marketplace link just for starters.
Where do you get that? I get them at Costco for I think about $1 or $2 a piece, in a 4- or 8-pack.
That was from an article, I got mine at BJ’s in a multipack for a lot less. When I bought my house we had a basement rec/play room that was a bit over done with lighting, 22 recessed lights, it felt like I was causing the neighborhood lights to dim every time I turned them on, so went with the florescent bulbs. Haven’t fully converted the entire house though, they take some time to fully light, so lights in high traffic area are still the old way.
There’s a hardware store in Central Square in Cambridge that sells them for $1-$2 each too. I think its name is Pill’s Hardware. A lot of other stores do seem to sell them for $8 each or so.
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At current electricity prices, they save about 1 cent every 90 minutes or so. Which means they pay for themselves once you have the light on for about 150-300 hours. If you have lights on for 2 hours every evening, that’s 2-5 months. And that’s if you are replacing a working incandescent bulb. If the bulb burns out and you have to replace it anyway, the payback time is much lower.
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The only problem with CFs that I’ve noticed is that they are very dim when they are cold. Our front porch light has 2 CFs in it, and you have to look at it to see if it actually turned on when it’s much below freezing out. It warms itself up and is at full brightness within half an hour though.
IIRC, there are specialty CF bulbs designed for colder weather. Google around…
Instead, I think a tax on wattage is wiser.
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Consumers today equate watts to brightness — which isn’t really correct. A 100W bulb uses 100 watts of power to operate. CF bulbs run on about 1/7th of that — so a 14 watt CF bulb is just as bright as a 100 W incandescent (they have the same amount of lumenocity, measured in lumens).
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The thing is, CFs don’t do well in some applications… a very small number, sure, but some. Furthermore, there might be another technology that comes around, and who knows how that will come to play. Why implement an outright ban when you can get 95% of what you want by encouragement?
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So — how to fix? Tack a 1 cent tax on every watt the bulb uses. This means that in the 100W inc. vs. 14W CF, the 100W will cost 86 cents more. Each. That adds up. Price it like gas — with the tax included. This also helps people choose the least bright bulb that will get the job done, be it CF, incandescent, whatever.
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Consumers and stores will continue to shift to CF as the sticker price differential ceases to favor incandescents.
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P.S. Just a few years ago (and maybe still today) places like Wal*Mart and Home Depot were selling incandescent bulbs at a loss (called a loss leader) in an effort to bring people into the store. Yip, they were subsidizing bad environmental policy. I hope that they’ve started to shift toward subsidizing CF bulbs instead, but I’m skeptical.
It’s simple and it accomplishes directly the goal of more people using CFL.
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While there’s something be said for using market forces–market forces don’t work so predictably when consumers don’t have the correct info or the time to choose wisely.
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But your idea has some merit. If a ban is a legislative no-go, then the tax of one cent per watt will do as a compromise.
is that there are some applications where current CF technology just isn’t good enough. Two (admittedly rare) examples:
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1. Extreme cold. CF bulbs, even ones designed for cold, take longer to “heat up”.
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2. CF bulbs are really just very high frequency strobe lights. The problem is that, in an area with fast moving repeating tools (think circular saws, etc), if the frequencies are perfect multiples, it makes the blade look like its staying still. The classic example is a movie/television shot of old west wagon wheels — there’s a point where the wheel’s rotation is spot on with the number of still shots taken per second in the video. If the wagon were to go that exact speed, the spokes would appear to be staying still on video.
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So, this can really happen. Mistaking a tool for not moving when it is moving is possible, and very hazardous.
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That’s why a tax is so elegant. These are rare cases, but really do exist. In those rare cases, the incandescent bulbs are still legal, and more useful. In all other cases, the CF bulbs are cheaper to purchase and cheaper to operate.
Americans tend to react poorly to things being banned.
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How about a 50 cent per bulb tax on incadescent bulbs, and a 50 cent per bulb subsidy on fluorescent bulbs?
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Unless the bureaucratic overhead was too high. Dunno. We manage to tax cigarettes without a problem.
is that the cigarette, gas, alcohol, etc. taxes are built in to the price. Somehow, that seems to work better, although I don’t really know why or how.
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In any case, as I mentioned above, there’s no reason to make it a flat “50 cents” per bulb — measure the wattage!
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Furthermore, I think subsidies are, generally speaking, bad policy. They encourage overconsumption, and this has been witnessed over and over again in practice, matching the economic theory quite nicely.
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It’s actually interesting to think about how the bulb question is so much like the hybrid car question. Higher up front costs, (potential) cost savings over the life of the item, and definitely energy savings, but with some new environmental concerns due to new technology. Should we also tax cars based on how many gallons of gas it takes them to drive 1000 miles? Say, $10 per gallon? It’s parallels to light bulbs seem pretty clear…
Having the current voluntary policy of buying florescent light bulbs creates a situation where there is no real incentive to buy them since even though in the long run they save more money people just look at the initial sticker price, also applying group pressure theory here, groups as a whole tend to refuse to opt in to such a policy. Take for example the NHL having a voluntary helmet policy well nobody would where helmets when the policy was opt in, so the NHL mandated it and the policy became opt out, in the sense that one could still play hockey without a helmet just not in the NHL. That analogy works for this and most environmental policies, either taxes which artificially raise the monetary price of bad decisions (since the average person is too ignorant of actual costs outside of their own pocket) or policies that ban poor decisions outright.
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The only problem with banning things is that this then creates a black market economy, i.e the banning the use of drugs to stop people from making bad decisions. Yes I also support a hefty gas tax and free to near free public transportation, also if the US stopped artificially subsidizing gas and car companies the real costs of gas would skyrocket to prices akin to the ones Europeans have to pay, and in case most people didn’t notice the average European either drives a car half the size on average as an American or if they live in a city take public transportation.
….silly, I don’t like the idea of being forced to use these bulbs exclusively because they cannot be dimmed. If you use them on a dimmer switch they flicker and hum. I actually use these bulbs in most places in my home but in two rooms I like to be able to dim the lights and I don’t use them there. This may seem like a petty reason, but there it is.
You actually have a few options — unless you have, say, a chandelier with “decorative” incandescent bulbs.
I will give them a try.
A lot of homes and especially businesses have very expensive lighting fixtures for which fluorescents are unsuitable, and cannot be converted overnight. Start off by positioning environmentally-friendly moves as an inconvenient and expensive burden imposed from above only on consumers and small businesses, and no number of hurricanes will be able to stop the political backlash.
I have gotten them at WalMart for far, far less than that. Maybe not much more than a conventional pack of bulbs (for one swirl).
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We have been using these fixtures for awhile, and I have found the following drawbacks:
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1. Cold. They don’t work well in the cold. I use them for the porch light, which is often left on inadvertently, but the bulb is quite dim inn cold weather.
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2. Quality of Light. I also have a few bulbs indoors, and I have found that the light is quite yellow. It makes people look rather like they are suffering from jaundice. The weird hue of the light is probably my greatest disappointment with the bulbs.
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3. Size. The size of the base of the bulb is such that they cannot fit in many lamps that require smaller bulbs. Also, I have a lot of recessed lighting in my house that requires the use of incandescent floods. The swirls are unsightly in these sockets. I will say that there are now “ceiling fan” size swirls, though I have not tried them.
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The size issue makes me wonder if a ban is feasible, at least until the technology improves so that it can be used for all applications.
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That said, we are slowly putting more of these bulbs throughout the house. I wish they made versions that were the eqivalent of 200 watt incandescents, so that they could also go in the basement and garage.
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Light bulbs — be they incandescent or CF — have a color temperature. This has nothing to do with hot or cold, but a bluer (cold) or redder (warm) hue.
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CF bulbs are available all over the spectrum, but you’ve got to look around, because places like Wal*Mart often only have one color within the spectrum for sale.
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I recommend poking around on line. There are a number of online stores which only sell light bulbs — and if you’re buying more than 1 or 2, the savings can more than cover shipping.
Probably Target. Just picked them up, about a year ago now. I don’t recall seeing any indication that they were supposed to be yellower than incandescents.
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Thanks for the suggestion.
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However, if the industry is to take off, it will have to find a better way than making us google for light bulbs to hunt for what we’re looking for.
The newer ones work in the cold. They just take a little while to warm up. I use one for my front porch and it is up to full brightness in half an hour. It is bright enough to be useful in about a minute or two even when it gets down to 0F outside. By useful I mean that it outshines the streetlight directly across the street from my porch. For most applications where you have a lightbulb in sub-freezing temperatures, it isn’t much of a problem to have to turn the light on a few minutes before you need it. The main time where this would be a concern is if you live on an unlit street and someone unexpectedly rings your doorbell late at night. If it is truely dark, you could probably see a person well enough to recognize them within 10-20 seconds even on the coldest night of the year. For most of the year it would be bright enough immediately.
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The indoor ones are all bright enough to read by as soon as they are turned on, even when it is only 50F inside. They do have to warm up before they reach full brightness, but you normally don’t need to flood your house with light suddenly. I actually think it is an advantage to have the lights dimmed slightly when they first turn on.
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The quality of light varies considerably from one lightbulb to another. It isn’t just flourescents that come in different spectrums.
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The size factor depends on what bulbs you get. The ones that came with the home energy inspection were small enough to fit in every standard socket I’ve seen. They also come in a few shapes other than the standard swirls.
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They do make flourescents that are equivalent in brightness to at least 150W incandescents and screw into normal light sockets. They are a different shape and will not fit in most light fixtures. I use them in stand up lamps (the ones that often have halogen bulbs). But by the time you want 200W equivalent lighting, you should probably use the larger flourescent lights. They are more efficient and provide better light. For a basement and garage, most people wouldn’t care about what the lights look like. But you do have to install a new light fixture.
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MassEnergy sells a large variety of efficient light bulbs. They have one made by Harmony that goes into a standard socket (although it has a wide base) that is equivalent to a 250W incandescent. They also have some that are shaped like regular light bulbs.
Yes, I need larger flourescents. But the basment and garage sockets are 70 years old, so that may require much in the way of “infrastraucture improvement.”
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Yes, I use the regular swirls out in the cold, and it is no big deal, but it is a potential drawback.
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We have a lot of recessed lighting, all of which makes extensive use of dimmers, so many of the swirls may simply be inappropriate.
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Thanks for the link.
…Most fluorescents we’ve used require 2-3 minutes to come to moderately reasonable brightness in cold environments.
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The problem is that most people will be unaware of the necessary wait time, and will likely reject the use of fluorescents as a result. It’s a matter of expectation.
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We put a fairly high-wattage fluoresent bulb in the garage a couple of weeks ago (I forget the wattage, but it is supposed to be equivalent to 150 watt incandescent), and in this cold weather it takes 4-5 minutes for it to come to useable brightness. Given that we only need to use the garage for a few minutes at a time, an incandescent of similar lumins would probably be more energy efficient than the fluorescent, since we have to wait so long for the fluorescent to fluoresce.
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If you’re going to have the bulb on for long periods of time, then definitely fluorescents are more efficient (although, see my comment below regarding use with dimmers). If you aren’t, there’s a bit of a trade-off between fluorescents and incandescents, and it’s not entirely clear which is more efficient.
There are several problems with fluorescent bulbs.
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One, they don’t come to maximum brightness immediately. Well, some may, but we haven’t discovered them.
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They don’t come to maximum brightness when they’re installed in a cold place, such as a garage or outside.
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They come in various colors, which are unpredictable. Or at least you have to experiment with them to find acceptable colors–and experimenting with bulbs that are already expensive is expensive.
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And, most importantly, they don’t work with dimmers. Well, some do, but you have to distinguish the bulbs that work with dimmers (when you want them to) from the bulbs that don’t work with dimmers (when that isn’t necessary), which is a pain the the hind end.
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Fluorescents are probably the wave of the future, but the manufacturers have made it so inconvenient that they just aren’t there yet.
LEDs will be in the mix, too, I suspect. Although I gather the technology is about where CFLs were 10-15 years ago.
Having said that, more than 3/4 of the bulbs in my home are compact fluorescents, and I’ve gotten well used to them.
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I saw somewhere that, if each household in the country replaced just ONE 100w incandescent with a flourescent of equal output, the resultant reduction in CO2 production would be (and my number might be off somewhat here) the equivilant of taking around 100,000 SUV’s off the road.
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Though the bulbs themselves do constitute a hazardous waste, which must be addressed, it seems to me that phasing them into more widespead use (NOT by fiat, please) would be a sensible thing to do.
but go directly to the unemployment line. ALL of those nifty little twistie lamps are made in China. The land where the entire product can be made for what the glass costs here. Sound like “free” trade to me. CEO’s free to run to the bank!
Just checked a pack of Phillips 60W I have, Indonesia. I find it hard to imagine that incandescents are made in the US.
we only have one plant left in the US for incandescents.
well I hope someone sees this since it’s an older post. where can I take old CFLs for recycling in the Merrimack Valley area?