Mercury problem even worse than suspected

Chinese workers mercury poisoned!

As I mentioned out in my March post about mercury in CFLs, many CFLs made by leading manufacturers in China are produced in fully automated factories where no worker is exposed to mercury. But there are also many smaller manual factories, in which the phosphors and mercury are administered by hand. The Times Online article 'Green' lightbulbs poison workers confirms this information:

"In southern China, compact fluorescent lightbulbs destined for western consumers are being made in factories that range from high-tech multinational operations to sweat-shops, with widely varying standards of health and safety." [1]

As I pointed out, hand-dripping risks more mercury being injected into each CFL than the specified limit. VITO, the consultant firm hired by the European Commission to do the preparatory study before the ban, found this procedure to be the likely explanation for the widely varying mercury content in sampled CFLs:

"VITO performed a control on the mercury content of a limited sample CFLi’s, currently available on the market. The control was made by atomic fluorescence spectrometry, conform CMA 2/I/B.3." (Sampe 1: 1.8mg; sample 2: 1.1mg; sample 3: 6.4mg; sample 4: 3.5mg, sample 5: 0.28mg.) "It must be stated that sample #3 significantly exceeded the maximum allowed mercury content. This is probably caused by the cheap but inaccurate method of mercury filling (drip filling) that seems to be very common in most small far eastern production plants." [2]

I also warned that this manual dripping will poison workers, as mercury vapourises at room temperature (+20 degrees Celsius). Now this is exactly what has happened!

"Large numbers of Chinese workers have been poisoned by mercury, which forms part of the compact fluorescent lightbulbs." [1]

Also, mercury mines in China are being reopened to meet the increased Western demand for CFLs!

"A surge in foreign demand, set off by a European Union directive making these bulbs compulsory within three years, has also led to the reopening of mercury mines that have ruined the environment." [1]

1. 'Green' lightbulbs poison workers
2. Domestic Lighting, Part 1, Chapter 4


Mercury contamination of your home

As if this is not bad enough, it appears that a broken CFL at home is actually more cause for worry than previously thought.

After the now infamous (and cited ad nauseam) accident in Maine, the Maine DEP had its own science team test how much mercury is actually left in a room after breaking a CFL on floors with and without carpets, which resulted in revised cleanup recommendations:

Revised Cleanup Guidance
Maine Compact Fluorescent Lamp Breakage Study (the original report)
Mercury in CFLs - special investigation (long and scary reading, including summary of the Maine Report + interviews & addintional info collected by Invesitate Magazine TV, New Zeeland)
New Electric Politics: The mercury issue (shorter summary of the summary)

Some quotes from the Investigate Magazine summary [with my emphases]:

"First off, the often-cited claim that bulbs contain only 5mg of mercury was clarified: it's an average. (..) The average amount of mercury in a CFL is 5 mg with a range of 0.9 to 18 mg. Obviously, the smaller (in watts) the bulb, the less mercury. Higher power (brighter) bulbs generally have more, although there can be fluctuations between brands as well."

"'Mercury concentration in the study room air often exceeds the Maine Ambient Air Guideline (MAAG) of 300 nanograms per cubic meter (ng/m3) for some period of time, with short excursions over 25,000 ng/m3, sometimes over 50,000 ng/m3, and possibly over 100,000 ng/m3 from the breakage of a single compact fluorescent lamp,' the report confirms.

"That's up to 300 times higher than the recommended safe level of inhalable mercury vapour. From just one light bulb. According to the DEP scientific study, while the 300 ng/m3 limit is the maximum allowable daily dose of mercury for the sake of legislation, there is in fact no known safe level for mercury exposure."

"To put the exposure in perspective, a study of workers who had been exposed on a regular basis to 33,000 nanograms/m3 of mercury (roughly a third of the 100,000 ng/m3 peak caused by a broken bulb), and compared in a neurological test to a control group of 70 unexposed people, found they scored worse on 'mental arithmetic, 2-digit search, switching attention, visual choice reaction time and finger tapping'."

"'Sensitive populations are of particular concern with mercury exposures for a number of reasons.' 'Elderly and unhealthy individuals may already be at comprised health and be more susceptible to mercury effects than a healthy individual. For example, mercury does kidney damage which could exacerbate an already existing kidney disease'."

"'Infants and toddlers have much more vulnerable brains.' 'Mercury exposures have serious impacts on fetal and infant brain development. Elemental mercury can cross the placenta from a mother to fetus.' 'It is well established that the developing organism may be much more sensitive than the adult to neurotoxic agents,' reports Maine's DEP study. 'For example, methylmercury exposure can produce devastating effects in the fetus, including cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness, and even death, while producing no or minimal effects in the mother'."

"The report also noted that following official clean-up guidelines was still not good enough to eliminate the pollution. 'Although following the pre-study cleanup guidance produces visibly clean flooring surfaces for both wood and carpets (shag and short nap), all types of flooring surfaces tested can retain mercury sources even when visibly clean. Flooring surfaces, once visibly clean, can emit mercury immediately at the source that can be greater than 50,000 ng/m3. Flooring surfaces that still contain mercury sources emit more mercury when agitated than when not agitated. This mercury source in the carpeting has particular significance for children rolling around on a floor, babies crawling, or non mobile infants placed on the floor'."

"[T]he scientists note that the mercury contamination was considerably worse – nearly double in fact – at summertime temperatures (32C) than winter (23C)."

"Additionally (and this is why carpets have to be destroyed), the scientific team repeatedly vacuumed carpets where bulbs had broken, to see if vacuuming did eliminate the residue. They found that even after several attempts, the mercury was still trapped in the carpet fibres. To make matters worse, some of the vacuum cleaners were so contaminated that cleaning them was impossible, meaning not only was the carpet over and out, so was the vacuum cleaner."

"'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,' warns the US EPA."

"Maine state government is now officially recommends (...) that 'homeowners consider not utilizing fluorescent lamps in situations where they could easily be broken, in bedrooms used by infants, small children or pregnant women, or over carpets in rooms frequented by infants, small children or pregnant women.'

"Then there's the problem of what to do with the toxic waste. Surprisingly, plastic jars, like large peanut butter containers with screw top lids were little better than plastic bags, also failing to prevent mercury vapour from leaking into the house. The best method of containing bulb waste is inside a glass jar with a hermetically sealed lid."

"Brandy Bridges: 'They're not as eco-friendly as we'd like to think. Just the fact that they're being shipped in trucks and who knows how many cases get dropped? You're in your local hardware store, and they're broken on the floor, and you're walking by unknowing that there's mercury there, that people are just walking by and breathing in, and a lot of people don't have a clue'."

"Perhaps the most dangerous aspect to the CFL mercury issue, however, is not the instant 'spike' exposure caused by a breakage, but the effect of a string of breakages over the years on the toxicity of suburban homes. Picture a low income family (...) forced to use CFLs because of the light bulb ban and because they cannot afford even more expensive halogens. Picture a breakage, then try and estimate the odds of a stressed out (or drugged up) householder following proper clean-up and disposal procedures.

"Then picture a few more breakages over the years, none of them dealt with properly. Then try and figure out how much mercury might accumulate in the carpets, floorboards and walls of such a house over a 20 year span. Then try and figure out the impact such poisoning might have on every family that moves through that house, and how many taxpayer dollars might be wasted dealing with the health or crime problems that erupt downstream because of mercury exposure.

"When you buy a house or move into a rental, you won't know whether the home you're moving into is contaminated by mercury, unless you go to the extreme expense of getting it tested. Your safety, and your family's safety, will rely on the ability and willingness of other ordinary [citizens] to properly dispose of mercury laden light bulbs, and you'll never really know. The real cost is not one light bulb breakage, but how badly affected homes will be after 20 years of amateur attempts to clean up one of the deadliest neurotoxins on the planet. A generation of children crawling on mercury-infested carpets would give new meaning to the phrase, "dumbed-down".

"On the strength of these scenarios alone, there's a good case for actually banning the use of CFLs in homes, outright and immediately."

I couldn't agree more. And I don't see how any responsible politician or environmental organisation could either, after getting this new information.


Mercury & coal

For those who still believe that incandescent bulbs "cause more mercury emissions via coal plants", please understand that it is nothing but a cheap PR trick which seems to originate from the pro-CFL/anti-lightbulb lobby organisation IAEEL 1993, and based alternately on:

1. U.S. conditions in which, at that time, 59% of electricity production came from coal. [1] June 2008 it was 48,5% and decreasing. [2]

2. A Danish 'study' (= calculation excercise) from 1991 [3] in which a 60W (730 lm) 1000h incandescent (GLS) was compared with a 15W (900 lm) 8000h CFL, the latter assumed to contain 0.69 mg mercury, while electricity production from coal was assumed at 95%, as was the case in Denmark at that time - the highest in Europe! [4]. Based on these assumptions, CFLs were estimated to emit 1.69 mg mercury per million lumen-hour during production, operation and crapping phase, and incandescents 4.86 mg. However, these figures were seriously flawed then, and are even more so today:

a. "0.69 mg mercury" in CFLs is seems like a random fantasy figure, especially back in 1991! In 1993, IAEEL estimated CFLs to contain an average of 5 mg. [1] Eu consultants VITO consider 4 mg to be a realistic average now. [5] (Both are extremely pro-CFL and are not likely to exaggerate.)

b. According to EuroStat, the EU share of coal used in electricity production was 39% in 1991 and has since decreased to 29% in 2006 (though varying widely between different countries). [6]

Correcting for a and b (while still assuming the 15W CFL to give as much light as a 60W GLS and lasting 8 times longer) we get:

- GLS operation phase: 4.86 mg - 66% = 1.65 mg (as long as EU permits unfiltered coal emissions) = total 1.65 mg Hg on average. (In countries that don't use fossil fuels for electricity production, like Luxembourg, Iceland, Norway, Sweden & Switzerland, the sum total is 0.)

- CFL operation phase: 1 mg - 66% = 0.34 mg + scrapping phase (assuming no recycling): 4 mg = total 4.34 mg Hg.

In other words, when feeding correct numbers into the calculation, we get the opposite result!

See also my recently updated post Life Cycle Assessment for more LCA studies and details. And my previous posts about Mercury and Recycling.

1. Mercury: A Broader Perspective, IAEEL Newsletter 3/93
2. EIA: Electric Power Monthly, September 2009
3. Life Cycle Analysis of Integral Compact Fluorescent Lamps, 1991
4. More on mercury, IAEEL Newsletter 1/94
5. Domestic Lighting, Part 1, Chapter 4
6. Eurostat: Panorama of Energy 2007

3f. CFL Analysis - Life Cycle Assessment

A CFL with integrated ballast is a complex piece of electronics, made out of glass, steel, aluminium, solder, copper wire, silicon, phosphors, fibreglass, various plastics, ferrites or ceramics, epoxy resins [1] and flame retardants. Different parts (e.g. ballasts) are often manufacturered in different places, sometimes in different countries, and then sent to the main factory for final assembly. See ballast interior here: CFL autopsy

Some have attempted to make "cradle-to-grave" estimates on CFL energy use, mercury emissions etc., so-called Life Cycle Assessments, but this is no easy task and results may vary depending on how many factors are included into the calculation, and what you mean by "cradle" and "grave".

For CFL proponents, "cradle" means when the parts get assembled at the factory, and "grave" means when they're returned to a recycling facility or end up in landfill. For realists, "cradle" means when the mercury, phosphors and rare earths are mined out of the ground and "grave" when the mercury ends up either in a new lamp, or via nature and the food chain, in us. I'm sure no CFL proponent wants to include the costs for brain damaged babies and lowered general health and mental function of future generations through slow mercury poisoning of the entire population.

But even without adding the last to the calculation, realistic assessments like the one done by Klaus Stanjek on behalf of Greenpeace Hamburg, show that CFLs' complicated construction may require 10 to 40 times more energy - and emissions - to produce than it takes to manufacture an incandescent bulb. [2] Even if they outlast 5-10 bulbs, and use less electricity in the use phase, they still seem to require more energy during their whole life cycle.

Compare with how simple it is to manufacture an incandescent bulb:

"It can also be argued that the incandescent bulb is quite environmentally friendly. Unlike higher technology lamps, the simple filament bulb does not require rare earth gases and phosphors, leaches no mercury, and requires no proprietary manufacturing patents. The incandescent light bulb is produced worldwide, and is often a local product, which requires less packaging and less fuel for transport from low-wage factories to high-profit markets."
- Jeff Miller, President-elect IALD, Director Pivotal Lighting [3]

Update 14 September: Before the ban, EU consultants VITO made a very extensive and detailed life cycle assessment attempt, which had the potential of straightening things out. But as far as I can tell, it appears to contain such serious flaws as to make the its final conclusions highly questionable:

1. Using unusual lamp wattages (54W GLS and 13W CFL) for base-cases, both with incorrect lumens for that wattage-class.

2. Putting clear and frosted GLS in separate classes despite the difference in output being virtually non-existent and all other things the same, while the widely varying CFL models (bare, covered, dimmable, outdoor, daylight, improved CRI etc) with their equally varying efficacies, applications and life spans get represented by one (!) class and CFL type only.

3. Incorrect (too short) life span for typical low-voltage halogen lamps, skewing comparison with other lamp types.

4. Overly optimistic estimations of CFL recycling rates ("20%" in all of EU).

5. Like most pro-CFL 'studies', this one does not count the mining process for the mercury and phosphors (stating a "lack of info" on that part of the process). A reader commenting a mercury article online appears to know more:

"To produce purified mercury in a CFL, the extraction process releases about 0.4mg for every milligram produced into the waterways, atmosphere, and soil as waste. This is a well-established worldwide average that includes many processes, both crude and hi-tech. This means that the 4mg in the CFL actually represents 5.6mg of mercury that enters our environment." [4]

6. Making distribution impact estimates on the assumption that all lamps are produced in Europe, while fully aware that most CFLs are produced in Asia:

"The distribution phase contributes more than 5 % of the life cycle impacts for 11 of the 15 environmental impact indicators. Impacts of this phase are the highest for the emission of PAHs (69 %), heavy metals (22 %), volatile organic compounds (VOC) (21 %), and particulate matter to air. This can be explained by the assumption related to transport in trucks from the retailer’s central warehouse to the shop. (...) according to the MEEuP methodology (section 5.3.6, page 96), a mix of means of transport (trucking, rail, sear freight and air freight) with assumptions on distances was used for all base-cases. This assumption could be considered as disadvantageous for lamps mainly produced in Europe (e.g. GLS-F and GLS-C) and advantageous for lamps produced in Asia (e.g. CFLi)." [5] [emphasis added]

7. Not including the energy used to recycle the mercury.

"Collected CFLi’s at end of life are crushed in a closed installation and sieved. The mercury containing fraction is distilated at 600°C to separate the mercury. The pure, metallic mercury is used again by lamp industry." [6]

This process seems more complicated than it sounds, and must require a substantial amount of energy too [7]:





8. Not including all the forced individual driving to remote recycling stations for householders who wish to leave their CFLs for recycling, or to the few retailers who have a recycling program, and then from them to the recycling stations, then transportation from recycling stations to reprocessing factories and from reprocessing factories back to the lamp factories. As Peter Thornes points out, when "the lamp industry" has their CFL production located in China, that's where the mercury has to be shipped back to.

"However, it is not just the energy requiring manufacture (after all, CFLs have longer lifespans, which gives some compensation). It is also the greater emissions from their longer transport from the fewer centra in which CFLs are economical to make (China), and it is also the further CFL transport emissions to recycling plants and the emissions of their reprocessing there, and the further transport of reprocessed parts to different locations.

This means that inter-continental transport between China and North America/Europe can take place twice, since CFL content including mercury may be shipped back to China for reprocessing and new manufacture. Even more significantly, shipping use of bunker oil, the worst CO2 emitting type of oil, greatly increases the emissions involved (more). [8]

Sounds like an awful lot of driving, shipping, processing and polluting, doesn't it?

1. Should There Be a Ban on Incandescent Lamps?
2. "Energy Wasting Lamp" by Klaus Stanjek
3. "What will be the fate of the incandescent lamp?" Pt1
4. Article comment by "lees"
5. Domestic lighting study, Part 1, Chapter 5 (pdf)
6. Domestic lighting study, Part 1, Chapter 4 (pdf)
7. Technical guidelines on the environmentally sound management of mercury wastes (pdf)
8. New Electric Politics: Life Cycle

3d. CFL Analysis - Mercury

About mercury from the EU Technical Briefing:

"Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs) contain small quantities of mercury and emit ultraviolet light which can, under certain circumstances, have a negative impact on people suffering from diseases accompanied by light sensitivity. However analysis shows that these two factors do not present a risk to the general public in normal use."

But there is an immediate risk to all users, especially children and pregnant women, if lamps are broken and mercury escapes into the air and is inhaled (since mercury vapourises at room temperature). Swedish environmental expert Minna Gillberg says all CFL bulbs should be marked with a skull-&-bones label to increase awareness of toxic risk. [1]
Although the risk of breaking a CFL at home is probably not overwhelmingly huge if people are informed of the risk and take care not to place them in luminaires that are easily knocked over, and the amount of mercury each bulb contains usually is minute and decreasing with age, even small amounts of mercury vapour may be harmful to inhale, especially for children, pregnant women and sensitive people. Therefore various national health protection agencies have issued safety instructions in case of CFL (or mercury thermometer) breakage. [2, 3, 4]

If you're lucky enough to be a U.S. citizen, you can always order a Philips Spill-kit for only $100.00... ;-)

"Offers Customers the tools to handle the clean up of broken mercury containing lamps. The materials may be placed in a sealed plastic bag and sent to EPSI in the standard EPSI-PAK lamp recycle box. Kit includes a pail containing training video, safety data sheets, instructions, guidelines for clean-up, mercury chemical information, gloves, scraper, brush, pan, dust mask, safety goggles, sponge pads, plastic sealable bags and large plastic bags."

The European Commission, however, continues to defend the CFL despite its mercury content, using one of the oldest CFL lobby arguments in the book:

"Indeed the decrease of mercury emissions resulting from energy savings (electricity generation in power plants has its own mercury emissions) outweighs the need for mercury in the lamps."

That someone in the 1990s came up with the idea to blame powerplant emissions on the lightbulb in order to get around the uncomfortable fact that FL and CFL contain mercury, is not as surprising as the fact that so many keep regurgitating this argument without ever stopping to consider the blatant flaws in it!

One eloquent exception is Dr Peter Thornes:

"This is based on North American studies, crucially making various assumptions:

"1. That most power is derived from coal. It is about 1/3 in the UK, for example, 1/5 in Ireland, and of course substantially less (and decreasing) in many countries. As an example, the US Government EPA 2002 5-year comparison diagram, variations of which are often used by ban proponents, assumes all power comes from coal, concluding that in such situations CFLs are better."

"2. That emissions remains at the fixed levels. Power station mercury release has for a long time been treatable by using wet scrubbers (chemical, not human, I hasten to add), in combination with recently cheaper and more effective injection and photochemical techniques."

"If and where power station mercury release is a problem, ecological warriors might want to do something about it, rather than just use it as an excuse to ban light bulbs. In a nutshell:

"1. What comes out of ever decreasing coal power stations chimneys can be dealt with: we know where the problem sources are and we can treat them
with ever increasing efficiency at lower costs.

"2. Compare that with scattered broken lights on all the dump sites, we do
not know where the broken lights are, and we can't do anything about them." [5]

Update June 4: According to EuroStat, the EU share of coal used to produce electricity has decreased from 39% 1991 to 29% 2006, though varying widely between different countries [6].

CFL mercury may also constitute a health hazard if thrown away with household garbage or in glass recycling containers:

"'The problem with the bulbs is that they'll break before they get to the landfill. They'll break in containers, or they'll break in a dumpster or they'll break in the trucks. Workers may be exposed to very high levels of mercury when that happens,' says John Skinner, executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North America, the trade group for the people who handle trash and recycling. Skinner says when bulbs break near homes, they can contaminate the soil." [7]

The EU Technical Briefing continues:

"The impact of both elements can be further reduced by using CFLs with an outer non-breakable lamp envelope."

Unless the lighting industry is willing to add more cost to the CFL by putting a teflon-coated unbreakable glass around all CFLs produced, and EU willing to put an immediate ban on all other CFLs sold, this suggestion is pure fantasy and cannot be used as argument for the breakable CFLs on the market today!

* Also note that there are both automated and non-automated factories in China. In the small, non-automated factories, workers distribute the mercury and phosphors into each CFL by hand! Besides the risk of easily exceeding the specified limits, mercury vapourises at room temperature [8] and Chinese factories are not exactly known for issuing protective gear to factory workers. How 'green' is it to poison Chinese labourers and create more toxic waste?

* Not to mention other developing countries where recycling comes very low down on poor people's list of priorities. India's lighting industry, for example, already uses 56 tons of mercury per year. If they are forced to increase the use of FL/CFL from current 10% to 100%, that will be 560 tons! [9]

This is truly alarming, considering the fact that one teaspoon of mercury is enough to poison a medium-sized lake!

Once you've opened Pandora's box and let the mercury out, there is no way of putting it back in again; it will just keep circulating and climb its way up the food chain. Thus, focus should be on the direct sources of mercury: fluorescent light and fossil fuels. Stop mercury emissions it at the source before its too late!

In my opinion, only FL tubes, CFLs and HID lights used professionally should be exempt from the EU mercury ban, as most factories, offices and shops already have well established routines for recycling tubes and lamps correctly and especially linear fluorescent tubes tend to be returned as they don't fit in standard trash cans. To put such a burden on private individuals - who usually already have enough to worry about without needing the extra hassle of safely disposing burned-out bulbs for recycling - can certainly not be called a wise and responsible decision.

1. Nyhetskanalen: "Expert varnar för lågenergilampor"
2. U.S. NPA: Mercury - Spills, Disposal and Site Cleanup
3. U.K Health Protection Agency: Fact sheet on mercury and CFLs
4. Swedish Chemical Inspection Agency: Kvicksilver i lågenergilampor och lysrör
5. New Electric Politics - Environment
6. Eurostat: Panorama of Energy 2006
7. "CFL Bulbs Have One Hitch: Toxic Mercury"
8. Mercury Waste Solutions
9. "Think before you make the switch to CFL!"