Friday, February 1, 2008

Mercury- not the planet.

I was super excited about those new lightbulbs that are suposedly better for the environment and better for your pocketbook. Plus, they have a cool shape -like a corkscrew. But watching the news (Channel 5- NBC.com) tonight got me seriously concerned. I have them in all my bulbs, I got my gma some and encouraged my boyfriends to get some to. The City of Chicago was giving 2 free bulbs away to low income households in December. The report on the news tonight showed that when the bulbs break Mercury is released! The woman who was being interviewed was upset because it cost her 2000 dollars to get the mercury out of her carpet, but I'm way more concerned about the health and environmental aspects of this release of mercury. I break stuff all the time, and if I break one of these new lightbulbs its serious! And what about when they burn out and we throw them out? I am sure 99.9% of them break. The report said an answer to this is to recycle them but who seriously takes the time to recycle a lightbulb? And you have to recycle them at a special HazMat (hazardous materials) place. What is going to happen when the 30 million that were sold last year alone (stats courtesy of NBC ten o clock news)find their way to the garbage dump and break and then all that mercury is exposed?

Check it out at NBC.com.
Worth worrying about a little.

2 comments:

Sarah said...

Gma = grandma
and I only have one boyfriend. I added an S to the end of that word for some reason.

Marquis said...

You put that S there for a reason!

Really there is nothing to worry about the planet is going to die anyway. But for real that is scary!