So I have a bunch of incandescent light bulbs sitting around since I have replaced them with compact fluorescents. I am interested in any bright ideas :idea: anyone can come up with about what to do with them.
Thanks,
~Nemea
Braggi
01-03-2008, 04:07 PM
Target practice. [ducking]
Just kidding. Throw them away. Giving them to someone isn't a favor although I suppose some people just have to have them since they can't stand CF bulbs. You could offer them here or drop them off in a box at the recycling yard at the closest dump/transfer station.
I throw them away. They're not particularly polluting to send to a landfill.
Old CFs are best collected and handed in at the dump where they are disposed of properly.
-Jeff
Lorrie
03-22-2008, 10:51 AM
Should have read Wacco before my posting...could have added to this thread..Ha ha.
~Lorrie
Target practice. [ducking]
Just kidding. Throw them away. Giving them to someone isn't a favor although I suppose some people just have to have them since they can't stand CF bulbs. You could offer them here or drop them off in a box at the recycling yard at the closest dump/transfer station.
I throw them away. They're not particularly polluting to send to a landfill.
Old CFs are best collected and handed in at the dump where they are disposed of properly.
-Jeff
Sciguy
03-23-2008, 08:45 AM
The fate of unwanted light bulbs is not a minor issue. Throughout the environmental community, creating waste by "proper disposal" (an oxymoron) or wanton discard is taken for granted. When better design of products or processes is suggested, the lament is always for an immediate solution right now to the existing problem of discarded garbage. The result is that decades go by with no progress in intelligent design that could nip future problems in the bud.
The exact same thing is being created in the fluorescent lamp market. The so-called better alternative CFL products are miserably poorly designed to maximize waste, now and later. Always saving a few cents by shortchanging design is chosen because of the easy, subsidized availability of garbage and dumps. So we continue to exhaust resources into dumps because there is no constituency for looking ahead a few years and making better products.
Lightbulbs are just one more of a long, long line of poorly designed products. All that ever goes wrong with a filament light bulb is that the filament burns out. The whole product could have been redesigned decades ago so that the envelope could be opened and a new filament installed. But instead, General Electric would rather have the whole world discarding entire units, filament, glass, base, connections etc. into a dump so that they can sell us a complete new unit that we have no use for. Since the discard apparently is cheap (because dumps are heavily subsidized) we raised no objections and so the practice became institutionalized.
Had we been able to replace the tungsten filaments as needed (a very tiny quantity of tungsten in each lamp - maybe a tenth of a percent of the weight of the lamp) we could also have been saving the broken filaments and reusing the tungsten metal. It happens that tungsten is so important a metal that the US government deems it a critical material and saves a stockpile of it in the event, due perhaps to war blockades, that the metal becomes unavailable at some time. Yet we blithely discard tons of it into dumps every year around the world, all because of low level wasteful design that is taken for granted.
So the answer of "where do I throw it" is not always some place to take and throw it. The right answer might be "nowhere". Work to change the assumptions of easy wasting that undergird our barbaric system of design and production so that that question does not continue to be asked, decade after century until all the resources of the planet are exhausted.
It is not enough to save energy. Energy does not trump every other saving. The elites are exploiting the current energy panic to sell more goods we don't need in every market. Soon we will be experiencing peak everything, not just peak oil and not peak energy. We need to think about all of it at once. Redesign all goods and get every garbage dump in the world finally closed and every garbage can just a bad memory.
Sorry for such a long answer to an apparently short question.
Paul Palmer
www.zerowasteinstitute.org
Should have read Wacco before my posting...could have added to this thread..Ha ha.
~Lorrie