Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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I wrote about this in the past, but CFL bulbs have a dark secret. It's near impossible to find a "safe" way to get rid of them.
CFLs contain a small amount of mercury, and well, there is already too much mercury in the water, hence the Tunas getting all loaded up with it.
In my area I've identified 2 places I can take my CFL bulbs for disposal.
CFLs are considered hazardous waste.
IMHO there should be curb side recycling or at least force everyone that sells CFLs to also support disposal.
But really, millions of CFL bulbs are still going to make their way to our landfills cause people are lazy or ignorant of the hazard.
The solution of course would be to have an energy efficient bulb that did not utilize mercury.
While I have lots of CFLs in my house (see my post on which ones I recommend) I also have lots of halogen and incandescent bulbs. I'm a big fan of the new Philips Halogena Energy Saver. Looks like Osram (aka Sylvania) is also getting in the game.
I expect LEDs and low energy incandescent bulbs to get better and more practical over time.
Bottom line is that CFLs have amazing energy savings benefits, but they are a major step down from incandescent and halogen bulbs. Hopefully CFLs will be a thing of the past in a few years.
Q. Isn’t the mercury in CFLs bad for the environment?A. Not if you dispose of used bulbs properly. In fact, using CFLs can prevent mercury emissions. If your electricity comes from a coal-fired plant, the mercury that exists naturally in the coal will be released when the coal is burned. Over five years, a coal power plant will emit 10 milligrams of mercury to power an incandescent bulb, and only 2.4 milligrams to operate a CFL. (Coal-fired power generation is the biggest source of mercury emissions in the U.S., accounting for about 40% of the total.) So, even if you dispose of a CFL with its 4 milligrams of mercury improperly, less total mercury will be released into the environment than if you used an incandescent bulb.