Great, just great. Don’t get me wrong, I like the LED bulbs, I have several in my house. But when we get back to basics, a tungsten light bulb doesn’t require a haz-mat squad to dispose of. It’s glass, ceramic, tungsten, some thin steel, and tin solder (if ROHS). CFL bulbs and now LED bulbs are so much more eco unfriendly and when they inevitably end up in landfills, they become a source of heavy metal. We may have gained short term energy efficiency, but the long term payback may not be worth it.
LED products billed as eco-friendly contain toxic metals, study finds
UC researchers tested holiday bulbs, traffic lights and car beams
From UC Irvine:
Those light-emitting diodes marketed as safe, environmentally preferable alternatives to traditional lightbulbs actually contain lead, arsenic and a dozen other potentially hazardous substances, according to newly published research.
“LEDs are touted as the next generation of lighting. But as we try to find better products that do not deplete energy resources or contribute to global warming, we have to be vigilant about the toxicity hazards of those marketed as replacements,” said Oladele Ogunseitan, chair of UC Irvine’s Department of Population Health & Disease Prevention.
He and fellow scientists at UCI and UC Davis crunched, leached and measured the tiny, multicolored lightbulbs sold in Christmas strands; red, yellow and green traffic lights; and automobile headlights and brake lights. Their findings? Low-intensity red lights contained up to eight times the amount of lead allowed under California law, but in general, high-intensity, brighter bulbs had more contaminants than lower ones. White bulbs copntained the least lead, but had high levels of nickel.
“We find the low-intensity red LEDs exhibit significant cancer and noncancer potentials due to the high content of arsenic and lead,” the team wrote in the January 2011 issue of Environmental Science & Technology, referring to the holiday lights. Results from the larger lighting products will be published later, but according to Ogunseitan, “it’s more of the same.”
Lead, arsenic and many additional metals discovered in the bulbs or their related parts have been linked in hundreds of studies to different cancers, neurological damage, kidney disease, hypertension, skin rashes and other illnesses. The copper used in some LEDs also poses an ecological threat to fish, rivers and lakes.
Ogunseitan said that breaking a single light and breathing fumes would not automatically cause cancer, but could be a tipping point on top of chronic exposure to another carcinogen. And – noting that lead tastes sweet – he warned that small children could be harmed if they mistake the bright lights for candy.
Risks are present in all parts of the lights and at every stage during production, use and disposal, the study found. Consumers, manufacturers and first responders to accident scenes ought to be aware of this, Ogunseitan said. When bulbs break at home, residents should sweep them up with a special broom while wearing gloves and a mask, he advised. Crews dispatched to clean up car crashes or broken traffic fixtures should don protective gear and handle the material as hazardous waste. Currently, LEDs are not classified as toxic and are disposed of in regular landfills. Ogunseitan has forwarded the study results to California and federal health regulators.
He cites LEDs as a perfect example of the need to mandate product replacement testing. The diodes are widely hailed as safer than compact fluorescent bulbs, which contain dangerous mercury. But, he said, they weren’t properly tested for potential environmental health impacts before being marketed as the preferred alternative to inefficient incandescent bulbs, now being phased out under California law. A long-planned state regulation originally set to take effect Jan. 1 would have required advance testing of such replacement products. But it was opposed by industry groups, a less stringent version was substituted, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger placed the law on hold days before he left office.
“I’m frustrated, but the work continues,” said Ogunseitan, a member of the state Department of Toxic Substances Control’s Green Ribbon Science Panel. He said makers of LEDs and other items could easily reduce chemical concentrations or redesign them with truly safer materials. “Every day we don’t have a law that says you cannot replace an unsafe product with another unsafe product, we’re putting people’s lives at risk,” he said. “And it’s a preventable risk.”
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This report is codswallop.
Its REALLY hard to break a LED, because they are very very small. (Unlike a conventional bulb or CFL). The typical composition of the LED is silicon (ie sand like off the beach) doped with TINY amounts of arsenic, gold, indium, gallium and various other odds and ends. The bond out wires are usually aluminium.
About the only one in there that matters is the arsenic, but the quantities are miniscule. You’d have to eat wheelbarrows full of the things AFTER carefully de-encapsulating them to have any worries.
Of the other things – alumimium is all around us, people EAT gold in certain treats and its used as a treatment for some medical conditions. Indium is a rare metal, gallium is too, but its inert and you can buy it as a geek plaything because it melts at body temperature.
These days pretty much all modern electronics, include LED’s, has to be ROHS compliant to satisfy Eurpoean law (and this was such a pain for the electronics industry generally that its been easiest to just go lead-free everywhere even when ROHS compliance is not required.) This compliance means there IS NO LEAD in a LED!
Don’t know where this idiot is coming from but it seems like his facts are way off the mark.
Boy, I sure do long for the good old days before technology ruined our lives, back when the odd sabretooth or Vibrio cholerae nailed ya long before anyone could worry about dying from a DDT, gallium arsenide, or viagra OD. 🙂
With the ban on incandescent bulbs the UK I was compelled to buy and install the expensive Philip’s CFLs. I now find that the much advertised life expectancy is untrue with many bulbs lasting for less than that of an ordinary incandescent bulb, before the tube becomes grey and the light output decreases.
More eco, save the world hype!
Try whis way !!!!
http://heatball.org/en/
Try a candle.
This is a very familiar and sad story. Remember biofuel production in Indonesia? It led to massive deforestation and an increase in ozone producing palm oil trees. There we had unintended consequences as a result of not taking time and not thinking things through, something we have been telling Warmists about – take your time and don’t rush, the world will not boil tomorrow.
Why don’t you just turn the damn lights off and go to bed early?
Henry as per my previous post which you must have missed:
Centrica, a French Company that owns British Gas has reported this:
Key Fundamentals Financials – Interim (28/7/2010)
Turnover £m 11,707
Pre-tax Profit £m 2,004
EPS p 25.78
DPS p 9.14
Not a bad profit margin in my book!
Whenever you have a new technology you get a lobby trying to force the world to adopt it. It was like that with windmills (sorry windturbines … cause they are new aren’t they) it was like that with new lights, it was like that with ID cards here in the UK. One could also mention swine flu jabs. Genetically modified crops, etc. etc.
The scheme works like this:
1. A lot of money is to be made
2. Someone dreams up some excuse why the public should buy it
3. Lobbyists are hired to persuade everyone politician that the public should be forced to buy it.
4. The opposition to the scheme is ….just the general public and they are neither organised nor funded to lobby for the status quo … so basically no one lobbies for common sense.
5. Being the gullible idiots that politicians are … they think that a few lobbyists amount to “overwhelming support by the public” … until that is they actually tell the public who have been blissfully unaware of their idiotic plans … and then it is too late because the politicians have already decided what is “best for use” (aka they can’t back down because that way they have to admit that they’ve been had by the lobbyists”
I live in Scandinavia or more precise Sweden. Here we need to heat our houses more that half the year. During this period it also get rather dark compared to the summer that is rather exeptionally bright with “white nights” etc.
Now the are about to ban the traditional light bulb here and replace it with LED and mercury filled CFL’s. So, for each bulb I replace my heater start to work harder …
Besides that the energy effiency is mad the new lamps never last the promised x-thousand hours…
But as you all noticed the winter season is cancelled by IPCC so it must be an artificial
problem …
Paracelsus pointed out that the poison is in the dose. Nearly everything is toxic in sufficient quantities – even water. In addition, animals, including H. sap., evolved in environments with all sorts of stuff in them, so the fact that we are here indicates that we have pretty good systems for avoiding damage. Some research a few years ago in Finland on ex-employees of a lead smelter compared their blood lead levels then and now, after retirement and found that their levels had been very high while in the plant but had dropped to normal since. So far as I can recall there were no obvious health problems either. Certainly, the only deaths from lead poisoning I know of occurred from being hit between the ears by several grains of the stuff moving rather fast. A couple of hundred years ago the cider drinkers of Devon and Dorset were afflicted with “Devon colic” which was later traced to the fruit acids in the cider dissolving lead from their pewter mugs. They didn’t die of it any more than the Romans who ruled the world’s greatest empire while eating off lead plates and sweetening their wine with lead acetate.
I have been shooting small-bore (0.22″) rifle for the last fifty years, often being able to taste the sweetness of lead after a long session on the range and am still a Mensa member. Sure, there is good evidence that lead is neurotoxic during a very short period of the brain’s development, but that seems to be over by the age of three. A two-year-old might have difficulty holding my 16 lb rifle (not to mention getting it from me in the first place).
There is also the interesting phenomenon of hormesis (the tendency of a small dose of something harmful to do good in small doses, i.e. the harm from a total absence of a toxin is greater than the harm from a small dose). I don’t think a lot has been done on this yet, but the cohort of people who were at Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki has been studied intensively and their general health has been better than controls since.
There is much we don’t know about pollution in general, and chemical substances in particular, so the sensible course seems to be not to panic and stick with what we know before panicking just because someone has developed an instrument that is capable of showing that what we’ve used for years has low levels of something nasty in it. If it didn’t kill our grandparents, it probably won’t kill us.
I would like to know who has made millions out of this fraud ? needs looking into
Ken Stewart says:
February 10, 2011 at 9:12 pm
In Oz we can’t buy old bulbs anymore, you can’t sell a house without an environmental rating which includes having eco lights, the new ones are dear, dim, and don’t last as long. What a great idea! What can we do next!”
Start burning bees wax candles and whale oil
lanterns! Both carbon neutral.
Overpaying for an inferior product is the norm for the environmental movement. The agencies no longer test equipment for reliability – only fuel efficiency. And what does the manufacturer do in that situation? Focus on cutting manufacturing costs to the detriment of reliability. In theory LEDs may well be a good lighting product because of the maintencance savings, but in practice I would bet the leds last for a lot longer, but the power supply becomes the weak link in the chain. Perhaps the standard charger initiative should be extended to standardize a dc power supply in the home.
If the entire environmental impacts were taken into account the answer most of the time would surely be to do nothing. This never had anything to do with saving the planet but making everybody spend time on their pet project to raise it in everybody’s conscious to justify their own extravagances. They will then try and take the credit for efficiency improvements which always would have been made, and use that as justification for their incredibly wasteful expenditure.
Re Angry Exile says:
February 10, 2011 at 9:10 pm
Our experience is that they don’t last in light fittings where the bulbs are horizontal, and they’re not worth a damn in a workshop lead light – one minor bump and a new bulb. No idea on contamination.
These bulbs do not do what they say on the tin. They are certainly not as powerful as they cl;aim to be. I do not know whether this is down to the colour of the light but you have to go up a couple of sizes. In other words, if you were running a 60 watt tungsten bulb, you need to replace this with the equivalent of at least a 100 watt energy saver bulb.
The other day I had to replace one of these bulbs that had been in service for just 2 years (may be slightly less) yet on the box, they claim that it will last for 10 years. This is not the first time that I have had to replace one of these bulbs after a short life span. They certainly do not last as long as the claim and this is important to their claims that whilst they are expensive, over their lifetime they will save you money. This is a false claim, if they last considerably less than they claim.
I am not even convinced that they are that much more energy efficient since they tend to change usage pattern. I have several bulbs that I now leave on 24 hours a day whereas with the tungsten bulbs I would have run them for only between 6 and 14 hours a day (depending upon summer/winter usage). One is tempted to think that it is only 9w or 11w so one becomes lazy and leaves the light on.
All in all, I suspect that these bulbs will be seen to be an enviromental disaster.
Agreed,
but apart from the possible CFL or LED problems,
the ban on ordinary incandescents makes no sense anyway:
Citizens pay for the electricity they use,
there is no energy shortage justifying usage limitation on citizens,
and if there was a shortage of finite coal/oil/gas, their price rise
limits their use anyway – without legislation.
Emissions? Light bulbs don’t give out CO2 gas -power plants might.
As it happens the supposed energy savings are not there anyway,
http://ceolas.net/#li171x
including US Dept of Energy references
Under 1% overall energy savings from a ban
Fumes when they’re talking about LEDs, not CFLs? Talk about Ye Olde Bait and Switch! And if a child munches down on a twinkling LED Christmas light, I’d think he’d be in greater danger of choking. He’d have to munch down on at least a whole string (and break through the plastic encapsulation) to be at risk of poisoning—in which case, he’s in dire need of parental supervision.
Another example of the environmental cost of the CO2 obsession.
[trimmed, spam]
@Angry Exile – February 10, 2011 at 9:10 pm
Halogen bulbs are not intended to be used with dimmers. They need to run hot. Using a halogen lamp with a dimmer will actually shorten its life. Look up “Halogen Cycle” for details.
Oh, for heaven’s sake – I’m so tired of all the hoops we’re becoming required to jump through just because of the minute possibility that trace quantities of some heavy metal or another in some manufactured product might find its way into the ‘environment’.
Besides the fact that the only significant ‘threat’ to the environment can be during and before the manufacturing process, where do they think these heavy metals come from in the first place? Are we now in mortal danger because we happen to live on a planet where lead, arsenic etc can be found?
Bah, humbug.
Halogen with reflector rules.
Even incandescent with reflector is superior to all this new nonsense.
Interesting article, but red flags go up when I read words like ‘could be a tipping point’. I also suspect the Department of Toxic Substances Control are going to be very keen on finding substances to control. Maybe I’m jaded and my trust in authority has been eroded by GW propaganda, but I don’t trust official pronouncements like this without seeing supporting data and taking context and proportionality into account. I wonder how many trace heavy metals we are exposed to daily without even realising? Also there are a lot of things that could harm a child if eaten. Luckily, children generally prefer food.
Harry the Hacker,
You’ll find that leaded solder is still the norm in safety-critical and high-reliability electronics. That’s because a lot of the problems associated with lead-free solder have not yet been satisfactorily solved.