Pox on Fox

Mr. Green is busy on his world-wide publicity tour for his new book. In the meantime, here's a Mr. Green classic column from August 2007.

Hey Mr. Green,
My whole family had embraced the concept of compact fluorescent bulbs (because they are so efficient), but a negative report from Fox News about their mercury hazards has us a little confused. Can you respond to our concern? --Carl in Center Moriches, New York

Hey Carl,
Thank you for calling my attention to this hatchet job, which I never would have noticed because I try to avoid the right-wing contrivances that Fox peddles as fair and balanced.

The people at Fox News are either brain-damaged from huffing mercury (they do seem to have a fondness for the highly toxic) or they have unscrupulously cherry-picked their facts. (In their sniping about the rules to replace incandescents with compact fluorescents [CFLs] "either adopted or being considered in California, Canada, the European Union and Australia," it's surprising that they overlooked the bulb-replacement programs in Cuba and Venezuela. That would've given them a fine opportunity to present compact fluorescent bulbs as part of a communist takeover.)

This classic example of enviro-bashing is full of flaws. First, the Fox writer trots out one report of one environmental bureaucrat's overreaction to a bulb breakage to make it sound like a busted CFL will turn a house into a Superfund site. The fact is, CFLs do contain mercury, but nowhere near enough to provoke panic or evacuation. If you break a bulb, you can do the cleanup yourself, without renting a moon suit or contacting authorities.

The EPA advises the following treatment:

1. Open a window and leave the room for at least 15 minutes (to let the mercury vaporize).
2. Remove all materials (i.e., the pieces of the broken bulb) without using a vacuum cleaner. You don't want even a small amount of mercury lurking in your vacuum. To do so:
   • Wear disposable rubber gloves, if available. (Never touch the bulb pieces with your bare hands.)
   • Carefully scoop up the fragments and powder with stiff paper or cardboard (you don't want the stuff to get on your broom or dustpan either).
   • Wipe the area clean with a damp paper towel or disposable wet wipe. Sticky tape, such as duct tape (yet another use for the versatile material!), can be used to pick up small pieces and powder.
3. Place all cleanup materials in a plastic bag and seal it. If your state permits you to put used or broken CFLs in the garbage, seal the CFL in two plastic bags and put into the outside trash (if no other disposal or recycling options are available). If your state doesn't allow this, consult the local hazardous-waste authority for safe-recycling information. Some hardware stores will also accept old bulbs; to find a recycler near you, try Earth 911, or (800) CLEAN-UP, for a location near you.
4. Wash your hands after disposing of the bag.
5. The first time you vacuum the area where the bulb was broken, remove the vacuum bag once done cleaning the area (or empty and wipe the canister) and put the bag and/or vacuum debris, as well as the cleaning materials, in two sealed plastic bags in the outdoor trash or protected outdoor location for normal disposal.

So much for that part of Fox's story, but I'm not quite done with calling them on their hokum. So read on, if you wish. The Fox piece chides environmentalists for contradicting themselves by promoting fluorescent lightbulbs while having "whipped up so much fear of mercury among the public that many local governments have even launched mercury thermometer exchange programs" and going "berserk at the thought of mercury being emitted from power plants."

Yes, as Fox notes, a fluorescent bulb contains around 5 milligrams of mercury (although some brands, such as Philips Lighting, claim their bulbs have as little as 1.23 to 3 milligrams). What Fox conveniently doesn't bother to mention is that a thermometer can contain 140 times as much mercury as a fluorescent lightbulb, making concern about these instruments eminently reasonable. Nor is it exactly going "berserk" to worry about mercury from power plants. Coal-burning power plants emit 50 tons of the stuff every year, around 40 percent of the total mercury emissions in the United States.

Since residential lighting accounts for about 5.7 percent of our total national electricity consumption--about half of which is generated by coal--creating power for home lighting releases about 1.4 tons of mercury every year. And since incandescent bulbs account for about 88 percent of all bulbs, they are responsible for emitting around 1.2 tons of mercury a year.

Let's imagine for a moment that all 4 billion residential lightbulbs have become CFLs, each one with an average life span of 5.5 years (the minimum for EPA-approved bulbs). That means we'd have to change about 727 million fluorescent bulbs a year. At five milligrams of mercury per bulb, that adds up to about four tons of mercury. Since fluorescents use only 25 percent as much energy as incandescents, installing them in all houses would decrease mercury emissions from power plants by 0.9 tons a year.

So even in the incredibly unlikely scenario that every single dead bulb were smashed, and its contents released into the environment, switching to CFLs would yield a maximum 3.1 tons of mercury each year--the 4 tons in them minus the 0.9 tons of emissions they offset. (If all bulbs used were the longer-lived models, with a life span of nine years, the net emission would drop to 1.9 tons annually even if not a single bulb got recycled. And as lower-mercury bulbs came online, the net release would drop even more.)

Fox simply ignores the fact that people don't have to throw away all those burned-out fluorescents in the first place. About 25 percent are already being recycled, just because the government requires businesses to do so. If consumers were better educated about compact fluorescents, they would recycle more of them, as they have learned to do with other materials. If we created an economic incentive--a stiff deposit on CFLs, for example--recycling rates would vastly increase, just as they have with cans and bottles in states where container deposits are required.

Of course, by focusing on mercury, Fox also fails to note that even the shorter-lived fluorescents would eliminate about 100 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants alone, and an equivalent amount of other pollutants. That's something to weigh heavily even against the heavy metal mercury.

Environmentally,
Mr. Green

Grave Matters

Mr. Green is busy on his world-wide publicity tour for his new book. In the meantime, here's a Mr. Green classic column from February 2007.

Hey Mr. Green,
Why assume that you have to have a lawn on your grave site ("Hey Mr. Green," May/June 2006)? — Herb in Ithaca, New York

Because I've already bought a grave plot, and the cemetery association maintains conventional turf. But I'm sticking with the site, which features assorted ancestors and dearly beloveds, scoundrels and all. Call such a custom deeply spiritual, profoundly human, or just stupidly sentimental, but it remains the preference for many of us.

Environmentally conscious folks who are less attached to tradition can join a growing movement for green burial, which inters ashes or unembalmed corpses in simple caskets, shrouds, or urns in woods or meadows that retain their original character. To learn more, visit greenburialcouncil.org.

Tales From the Crypt

Mr. Green is busy on his world-wide publicity tour for his new book. In the meantime, here's a Mr. Green classic column from January 2007.

After I wrote that "I'll have all the lawn anybody could ever want soon enough in my cemetery plot," Herb from Ithaca, New York, wondered why I plan on being buried under conventional turf when greener options are available. Other readers have suggested that I arrange to have my corpse composted, or to recycle the usable parts by donating them to medical research. Some have just demanded my corpse.

In considering these matters, I realized there's more to this topic than I thought. Looking for connections between death and the environment led to some rather dark philosophizing. I've already suggested that lawns are a type of death denial, in that they're replicas of cemeteries where the owner glides on the mower, godlike and immortal, over the pristine green, enjoying the illusion of immunity from burial below. Replacing lawns with a variety of plants requires us to cope with dirt, death, and decay--literally as well as figuratively.

On the other hand, I cherish the custom of setting aside sacred places or objects that help us commune with the dead, a tradition that unites so many cultures, from Chinese to African, Mexican to Native American, with my own Catholic brethren--though the spirit of the latter's All Souls' Day, like Christmas, seems to have been subjugated to the vulgar commercialized frenzy of today's Halloween. I'm just waiting for the kiddies in their $200 designer costumes to start demanding gourmet candy, at which point, they'll get one raisin per bag (which overprotective parents will promptly throw away, convinced it's laced with poison).

Anyway, while cemeteries are obviously not a very good idea from a strictly environmental point of view, their usefulness in remembrance rituals is perhaps ultimately beneficial enough that the trade-off is worth it. Being more in touch with our mortality might help us to reduce the desperate consumption that is often driven by fear and the urge to banish death. Owning the "safety" of an SUV, building trophy homes with elaborate alarm systems, "protecting" our families with guns under our pillows (while electing right-wing politicians who loathe gun control and the environment), taking drastic medical measures to maintain our loved ones in a vegetative state--maybe these are, at their essence, tricks to distance ourselves from death and the dead.

Greener burials--which I strongly support--might be more popular if there weren't as many misconceptions about the disposal of remains floating around as there are myths about where your spirit goes to hang out after you're dead. For example, some people think that embalming is required by law. This is only true if your corpse is being transferred across state lines. A requirement for embalming would violate the religious freedom of Jews and Muslims, whose faiths forbid the practice.

Why is this important to know? Because embalming is probably the most environmentally hazardous aspect of how we handle our dead. Treating the typical corpse takes about 2.5 gallons of embalming fluid, in which the active ingredient is formaldehyde, a toxic substance and possible carcinogen. With about 1.7 million corpses being buried each year and eight ounces of formaldehyde per gallon of embalming fluid, we're talking around 250,000 gallons of the poison. (Little wonder the European Union is considering a ban on formaldehyde use for embalming.)

Other concerns that often come up are relatively minor in the big scheme of things. Though there are certainly a lot of resources spent on conventional caskets and burial vaults--about 105,000 tons of steel, 1.6 million tons of concrete, and around 35 million board feet of hardwood--that's but a fraction of the materials used annually in building, road, and automobile construction. A three-ton SUV contains ten times as much steel as the casket you'll ride in if you get killed when it rolls over.

In terms of land use, the typical cemetery can hold between 1,000 and 2,000 dearly departeds per acre, so we're devoting a maximum of 1,700 acres of new cemetery ground each year. Not much land compared to what we dedicate just to parking lots. As always, though, Mr. Green favors a minimalist approach. If there were ever a time to avoid conspicuous consumption, it would be after you're no longer around to enjoy it!

Even cremation, which is more environmentally sound than conventional burial, has come under, um, fire by environmentalists. Some fret about the amount of energy it takes to go from ashes to ashes. Others worry that vast amounts of toxic mercury escape from dental fillings when the bodies that held them are heated to the necessary temperatures. On the first point, thermal processing of a body, starting with a cold furnace, takes an amount of energy equal to that in 16 gallons of gasoline--or about what an SUV burns through in 200 miles. And even this figure is high, because once the furnace is stoked for the day, later customers require far less heat. As for the fillings fear, let's do the math: The average American has 7.22 fillings, each of which contains 50 to 100 milligrams of mercury, for a maximum of 722 milligrams per mouth. With 721,000 folks choosing cremation each year, that's a maximum possible mercury total of 520,562 grams, or about 1,100 pounds. That's also assuming that all fillings contain mercury--and that all the cremated geezers had any teeth left anyway.

One EPA study put the figure at a more realistic 278 pounds per year from all the crematoriums in the country--a fraction of what's emitted by power plants and other industrial facilities. Far more mercury escapes just from fluorescent bulbs that are tossed out instead of recycled. Environmentally, you just can't make up for living poorly by dying well.

The Latest on Lawns and Lingerie

Mr. Green is busy on his world-wide publicity tour for his new book. In the meantime, here's a Mr. Green classic column from April 2007.

Every so often, us environmental muckrakers, doomsayers, and alarmists actually get to declare a victory. In my rant against the environmental silliness of lawns, I pointed out that one session with a lawnmower could spew as much pollution as driving a car for 100 miles. But now the EPA has given California permission to require catalytic converters on small engines like those used in mowers, a move that will cut the machines' smog emissions by 40 percent. The EPA is now considering setting national emission standards for small engines.

Also chided here was Victoria's Secret's use of pulp from virgin forests for the 350 million sexy catalogs it sends out every year. Under heavy pressure from ForestEthics and its chainsaw-wielding protestors, the lingerie company has agreed to stop using pulp from Canada's boreal forest, and to use 10 percent post consumer recycled paper or paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, in its catalogs. Now I just have to convince my cousin Nubby that recycled paper is not going to let more of the models' attributes show through their lingerie.

Enviro Cost of a Bad-Hair Day

Hey Mr. Green,
I was at a bar the other night with a friend, and we came up with a question we thought you might be able to answer: How many households would need to exchange their incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescent ones to compensate for one Hollywood celebrity flying cross-country in a private jet to get a haircut by his or her favorite beautician?
--Nelson in San Francisco

Finally, a celebrity question more meaningful than "Is Angelina pregnant again?" or "Will Britney get her kids back?" Assuming that the star has a midsize charter jet and takes eight or nine groupies along for a 2,500-mile ride (roughly Los Angeles to New York), his or her share of jet fuel burned would be about 175 gallons, or 22.6 million British thermal units (Btus). Since it takes about 10,210 Btus to make a kilowatt of electricity, the flight would use up the equivalent of 2,214 kilowatt-hours of electricity.

Because a 25-watt fluorescent bulb is four times more efficient than an incandescent one yielding the same amount of light, the fluorescent will save 600 kilowatts in its 8,000-hour lifetime. Therefore, you'd only have to buy four fluorescents to save the energy required to fly the celebrity to the beautician. Amazing but true. Actually, let's make that five fluorescents because there's obviously a lot of energy squandered hauling his or her celebrity ass to and from the airports in a 15-mile-a-gallon limo. And that's not even counting the energy consumption of the paparazzi and media acolytes, which would change the equation considerably.

But time is also a big factor. The above calculation reveals the energy savings for the life of the bulb. If you want to know how many fluorescents you'd have to buy to compensate for the energy wasted for the duration of the celebrity's flight, the number changes dramatically. At a cruising speed of 540 miles per hour, your speculative celeb would be airborne for about five hours on the trip. In that time, a single fluorescent bulb would save only 0.375 kilowatts. So you'd need about 5,900 fluorescents to make up for the energy consumed on that particular flight. The beauty of this is that you can spin the argument either way, depending on how you want to package it!

And whether you buy four or 5,900 fluorescents to offset your favorite celebrity's flight, remember to recycle those bulbs when they die out. Since they do contain toxic mercury (albeit a small amount), that's the only way to truly lighten the burden of the environmental guilt he or she doesn't feel anyway.
Environmentally,
Mr. Green

Let There Be Light

Not all readers of my last mailbag wrote to defend Fox's honor. Some had interesting points to raise and embarrassing errors to point out.

Hey Mr. Green,
Your CFL article makes many excellent points. Here are a few more items that you might share with the public: The EPA's Office of Solid Waste has slightly updated the cleanup guidelines you're linking to, so in case anyone asks about the minor differences, keep pointing them to the linked FAQ as the latest from the EPA.

The Office of Solid Waste has also introduced a new resource for finding local bulb-recycling programs that will continue to be updated, epa.gov/bulbrecycling. Hope this helps!

Finally, I hope that in the future you'll tell people to look for the government's Energy Star label on lighting. This indicates the longest-lasting CFLs out there, and in training people to look for the label on lightbulbs (the most commonly purchased energy-using item in the home), we also help them look for it on the more than 50 other types of products that can now earn the label, and set the stage for the next advances in energy-efficient lighting: light-emitting diodes, or LEDs. --Wendy Reed, Energy Star campaign manager, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Through a Bulb Dimly

My disparaging remarks about a Fox News report on compact fluorescent lightbulbs in the July/August mailbag brought a flood of comments, many of them defending Fox against my purportedly mean-spirited, angry, and divisive attitude. Here is a sampling of those responses:

Hey Mr. Green,
Before you rant that anyone with a different point of view from yours is demented, you should check out not only the condition of your own brain but also the depth of your knowledge and the sources of your information. ---Marilyn in New York

Hey Mr. Green,
If you had been less snide and less concerned with attacking Fox, you might have been more convincing in defending the environmental benefits of compact fluorescent lightbulbs. I am legitimately concerned about the existence of mercury in CFLs, which you downplay and the Sierra Club appears to be trying to minimize. --Jonathan in Endicott, New York

Hey Mr. Green,
Your recent response to the inquiry about the safety of compact fluorescent lightbulbs reminds me why I let my membership in the Sierra Club lapse. I suggest that if this involved something other than CO₂ buildup, you would have difficulty seeing the positive in adding to the already increasing environmental load of mercury. It is hard for me to see how this discussion makes the case for CFLs. --Brice in Berkeley, California

Hey Mr. Green,
Wow. There are people who care about the environment and aren't brain-damaged right-wingers, but aren't off-the-edge lefties either! I am a [Sierra Club] member and listen to Fox News. Stick to the facts and don't try to run off those of us who aren't so near the edge. --Clare

Hey Mr. Green,
It was quite disappointing to see Mr. Green exhibit his ignorant, narrow-minded bigotry by his discourteous name-calling and unfair bashing of Fox News. Although they could have presented their article a little differently, it was factual. As you may already know, Fox News is probably the most accurate news source on television, and they do make an honest attempt to present opposing views, which is refreshing, since most networks peddle their own.

But people like Mr. Green obviously do not want to hear the truth unless it is consistent with their own biased views and distorted beliefs. It is disappointing to see that the Sierra Club allows such inaccurate propaganda and stupid insults to appear in its publication. --Michael in Coldspring, Texas

Hey everybody,
Well, now, I never dreamed of being in the same predicament as Fox's poor old Bill O'Reilly, who is so often accused of being a narrow-minded, bigoted, and discourteous name-caller.

But I'm not sure that challenging Fox News makes anybody an "off-the-edge leftie." The network has been criticized by plenty of people who are miles away from the leftist fringe, as can be seen in interviews with mainstream journalists who rip Fox in Robert Greenwald's documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism.

Moreover, since Fox's headline reads "Junk Science: Light Bulb Lunacy," meaning it thinks fluorescent bulb advocates are bad scientists and nutcases, tweaking Fox for brain damage from mercury poisoning seems fair enough. I certainly didn't mean to offend anybody but Fox News, though the network's many dedicated viewers seemed to take my jabs personally. But come on, folks. Listing the EPA's detailed instructions on how to clean up a broken fluorescent bulb isn't "downplaying" the toxic problem of mercury in said bulbs. (In fact, I've harped incessantly on the need to recycle them).

This didn't satisfy some readers, who argued that the "difficult" cleanup procedures only go to show that fluorescents are too dangerous.

My advocacy of fluorescents is not motivated solely by concern about carbon dioxide emissions. It seems to me that what's getting lost in the debate about global warming is the basic fact that we ought to be (and easily could be) using a lot less fossil fuels anyway. Fossil fuels pollute the water and air and do tremendous environmental damage in many ways. (To name a few: the destruction of entire mountaintops in West Virginia, the polluting of streams with coal slurry, wrecks and leaks from oil tankers, gas and oil residues in streams, forests harmed by acid rain from power-plant emissions, drilling threats to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and oil-driven urban sprawl.)

On top of this, the very fact that the fossil-fuel supply is finite ought to make us consume it more prudently-something we recognized more than 30 years ago during the energy crisis, when we doubled fuel efficiency in cars, but soon forgot, thanks to the malignant efforts of the energy and auto czars.

Finally, profligate use of fossil fuels shifts capital away from more essential and practical investments. In a sense, wasteful burning of fossil fuel is like burning money. Some would argue that if we didn't waste so much money igniting gasoline in the SUVs we drive across bridges, there might be more capital left to fix those structures.
Environmentally,
Mr. Green

Hey Mr. Green,
If you had to recommend a particular brand of gasoline, which would be "best"? Because BP emphasizes "beyond petroleum" and was the first oil company to stop lobbying to drill the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, I've been filling up only at BP-Arco stations. But with its recent pipeline leak in Alaska, I'm having second thoughts. — Helmuth in San Jose, California

Deciding where to buy gas is about as tricky as waltzing with Dick Cheney on his favorite oil slick. Different oil companies are responsible to varying degrees for different woes. (To name a few: polluting air and water, destroying wilderness, poisoning indigenous people's land, promoting denial of global warming, exploiting workers, and even collaborating with oppressive governments that don't give a dipstick about human rights or environmental protections.)

Further complicating the matter, most oil companies actually do some good things for the planet, such as supporting conservation groups or developing alternative energy sources. But all things considered--and despite its pipeline fiasco--BP-Arco is still your "best" choice, along with Philadelphia-based Sunoco. To see how Sierra ranks the eight biggest oil companies, visit sierraclub.org/sierra/pickyourpoison.