CFL downside
One of the easiest things we can do to help conserve energy is to make the switch from incandescent to high efficiency light bulbs (compact fluorescent or LED.) LED lights have some very interesting upside, but are priced out of the market for most people to consider making the switch to them ($40-$100 per bulb.) CFLs on the other hand, are available for less than $3 per bulb and offer 70% energy savings and 13 times the lifetime of comparable lumens incandescent bulbs.
CFLs, like all vapor tubes, need a small amount of mercury to function correctly. That’s the downside of the CFL bulbs because proper disposal becomes very important, managing and cleaning up breakage is equally important. Each CFL has about 5 milligrams of mercury in the bulb and as we all know, mercury is hazardous to humans. So, there is going to be a large business opportunity in the not too distant future for safe recycling of these bulbs to recover the mercury and the glass for reuse.
This being said, CFLs still hold the advantage even in mercury as incandescent light bulbs indirectly, through increased power requirements over the lifetime of the bulb, cause around 12 mg of mercury to be released into the atmosphere through the coal combustion process, so replacing incandescent bulbs with CFLs are still a good thing to do even when factoring the special recycling and clean up efforts required with CFLs.
The other drawbacks to CFLs often cited are light quality, time to maximum lumens, and special use situations. These objections can all easily be over come with proper CFL selection now. There is a CFL bulb available for nearly any use from outside, to spotlight, to dimmable bulbs which emit light levels across the spectrum.
No technology is perfect and available without tradeoff, CFLs are no exception. But on balance, the benefits outweigh the risks and downsides. Let’s hope we see some more aggressive adoption of the technology through the next few years.
