67 Replies to “How Do You Dispose Of Your Toxic Twisty Bulbs?”

  1. I wrote a comment along these lines a month or two ago. I do more than a bit of work in a housing progect,which I affectionately refer to as the “ghetto”. The residents dispose of appliances on the front lawn.I use them as stepping stones to avoid the never shoveled sidewalks.

    I’m sure they dispose of the CFL bulbs in a proper manner though.
    i

  2. It will take me years to run out of the incandescent bulb I have stored. If I have to get rid of any I think I will mail them to Fruitfly Sukiyaki.

  4. I can only imagine the mercury contamination of the soil and what that will cause. I always figured something stupid like this would happen. At least we’re solving a real problem global warming right? Right?

  5. I usually grind my toxic twisty bulbs into a fine powder which I mix with turpentine and pour into the nearest sewer grate. But it depends on my mood.

  8. David Suzuki Foundation:
    Vancouver
    219-2211 West 4th Ave
    Vancouver BC
    V6K 4SL
    Toronto
    101-179 John Street
    Toronto Ont.
    M57 1X4
    Ottawa
    415-151 Slater Street
    Ottawa Ont
    K1P 5H3
    Montreal
    307-460 rue Sainte-Catherine
    Ouest
    Montreal QC
    H3B 1A7
    David will know what to do with them…lol

  9. I mailed one to Dr. Fruit Fly. Of course I mailed it from another city, with no return address.
    I told him there is no toxic-waste station where I live, and that he could twist the bulb into a place where the sun never shines – of course I was referring to his basement.
    I am thinking of sending the next one to my MP, after all they [the Cons] banned a perfectly good bulb – so they could bring in Global Warming/Climate Change policies. I wish they would either come out and say it is a lie, OR just continue passing these useless laws and saying they believe the enviroMENTALists.

  10. Odd that the MSM is all a twitter over this now. Why were they so silent when the legislation was first proposed?
    Oh; I forgot; a conservative Government is responsible. They aren’t supposed to care about the environment.

  11. Human nature dictates the toss the nasty things in the landfill solution. I can see armys of people sneaking about dumping bulbs in industrial, City, or one man dumpsters.
    Stupid is as stupid does!!!
    JMO

  12. ‘ClownParty’ has the germ of a great idea;
    save up a few and drop them off at your local MP’s riding office…let THEM figure out how to get rid of the damn things.
    Why should my local Canadian Tire have to take my COSTCO purchased bulbs for recycling? They have to pay to have it done, not to mention actually getting them to the recyclers.
    http://www.productcare.org/BC-Lights-Fees

  13. I assume that at some point there will be legislation passed to add a disposal fee to the original cost of the bulbs. I will than take this to mean that disposal is their problem since I will have already paid for it, so I can just dump the things wherever I want and it will be up to them (whoever they are) to take care of it. After all, in the nanny state the government takes care of everything. They will then hire thousands of garbage pickers to go through everyone’s garbage or dumpster to recover the twisties. Maybe they will entrust the job to the guys who wander around my neighbourhood pushing stolen Safeway carts. After all, they are already searching through my ‘recycle bin’ for bottles and cans to pay for their booze.

  14. I disassemble mine first to see what component failed and there’s a hell of a lot of electronics in a CFL which is massive overkill to produce light (Edison solved the problem in a far simpler fashion). The most common components to go are electrolytic capacitors which often explode and spray electrolyte over the whole inside of the lamp base. The explosion patterns remind me of the electrolytic capacitor explosions on computer motherboards 10 years ago when the chicoms incorrectly copied a Japanese electrolyte composition and the net results was tens of thousands of blown motherboards. Usually the faulty capacitor explodes and often catches on fire with shredded paper and layers of aluminum foil everywhere. The computer fires I’ve had (3 of them) were all caused by faulty electrolytics. I guess the chicoms have now found a new market for their bad electrolyte.
    What surprised me is that I got a quite itchy rash from pulling out one of the blown capacitors so there’s a lot more than NaOH and Al foil in the capacitors. Then there’s all of the lead solder used to attach the components to the circuit board at the base and pyrolysis products generated from the almost inevitably burned circuit board. Wonder when the incandescent bulb will be brought in as a non-toxic replacement for the CFL?
    When one performs a reliability analysis on the circuit which is basically a poorly built switching power supply, one finds a very large number of potential failure modes compared to just a few low probability failure modes in an incandescent bulb. Switching power supplies are notoriously sensitive to power line spikes and once enough bird-blenders are in service they will do double duty as CFL destroyers. The chicoms must be laughing all the way to the bank.

  17. I bought 2 cases of 60 watt bulbs 2×48 on sale at
    kents@$17.88 to add to an already fairly big stash,going for some more 40&100s today while they last.

  18. Why anyone would buy the twisty screwy “bulbs’ in the first place is puzzling, but if it will anger Suzuki, toss them in the garbage.

  20. I’m disappointed that “Run them through a meat grinder and sprinkle the crumbs on the lawn of David Suzuki’s summer home” wasn’t an option.

  24. Yep, page link’s been disintegrated.  It’s also not on their overview page of all “Point of View” pages.  That’s pretty effective vaporizin’, fer sure…

  26. The CBC page was there just 20 minutes ago.
    I guess they didn’t like the public reaction and pft! down the memory hole.
    I think they disappeared it because it made them cry, poor babies.
    The commies will never learn that they can’t force social change through repetitive propaganda and punitive taxes/regulations.
    Hey CBC, the real pollution from CFL bulbs is on your heads for touting the imaginary pollution of CO2.

  27. “Sorry. We can’t find the page you requested.”
    I wonder if another online poll went horribly wrong?

  28. Hey CBC, the results weren’t quite as expected? An overwhelming amount of people responded that they throw them in the regular garbage (something like 866 out of 1,000 at the time). Guess that us Canadians aren’t as enviro-conscious as they thought?
    We don’t use them, have my stash of incandescents in the basement. So maybe I’m an environmentalist after all. Oh the horror!

  29. As some of you have already noted, the link is down. In any case, my vote would have been “in the garbage”.
    The nonsense just keeps coming, if it is not expensive mercury laden light bulbs, it is the zip lock police.

  30. Decontamination after a mercury spill is a difficult operation. I’ve seen it done twice: once
    with an old laboratory building, which was shut for two years (and then reopened with an institute for political science in it);
    once with a room for students, which was shut for a month or so. The EPA memorandum posted by ES really soft-pedals the level of effort required.
    Of course the amounts of mercury involved are trivial, and sensible people use incandescent anyway, if they can still get them.

  31. In over ten years of service I have only had one of my twelve ‘twisty’ bulbs fail. I threw it in the garbage.

  33. Ooo, SDA gets results! Poll has been quietly REMOVED, yowza!
    Tell you why too. Not only is Dr. Fruitfly displeased that OBVIOUSLY everybody is going to chuck the damn things in the garbage, but this represents a GOLDEN opportunity for the CPC to roll back a beloved piece of envirowhacko legislation for perfectly legitimate environmental reasons.
    I mean, what -does- one do with metric tons of mercury contaminated, capacitor filled, lead soldered dead twisty bulbs?
    I see a repeal, CPC. Pay attention!

  34. Those CFL bulbs are a disaster
    The area in china where these are manufactured the whole area is polluted with mercury, the workers at the plant have hundreds of times the level mercury poisoning. (just wait, and see when the Incandescent bulb is band ). They are harder to make then the incandescent bulb, have no real safe recycle program, manufactured offshore for labour costs and environmental concerns. Shipped half way around the word, not to mention the health concerns and cost to the medical system as people get sick from using them, never last as long as they say they do. New technology like the energy efficient incandescent bulb (designed and manufactured here) won’t see the light of day as manufacturing ramps up offshore and we loose out new innovations and good paying jobs. I have been through green blog sites, and for the most part they are against the CFL because of the above. I don’t believe this ban had anything to do with the environment, but big business and a government supported monopoly system. That problem is with all political parties.

  35. What does Egypt and the CBC have in common? They both shut down mass communication when the message doesn’t go their way.

  36. Oz wrote: “The commies will never learn that they can’t force social change through repetitive propaganda and punitive taxes/regulations.”
    Oh, but they can, at least in Canada. If you are 50 or over, you can cite dozens of examples of such social engineering.

  37. Joe at 9:55:
    Are you serious? These things fail WAY before their “supposed” life-span. I have one fail every month or so, sometimes with accompanying smoke and charred plastic. These things are cr@p, and do not deliver on their longevity promises. I bought a 10 pack from Costco (Luminus) about 2 months ago, one bulb has already failed…..

  38. I’m not a fan of those twisty buggers, and have started stockpiling good ol’ fashioned incandescents. But there may be a solution to the short life of CFL’s.
    When my wife bought a bunch of the twisty’s we put them in our wall lamps in ther basement (where the sun never shines…thanks, Clown Party!). They burnt out disturbingly quickly and I got fed up with them. My wife reasoned that the wall fixtures were the cause, as they were an enclosed globe glass. We swapped the old globes with new, open style sconces, which allowed the heat generated to escape. That was a year ago, and truth be told, not one of the twisty’s have burnt out. The light’s still inadequate, and I’m still stockpiling incandescent bulbs, but as to the short life of CFL’s, it appears they need the heat to escape.
    Say, all that wasted heat can’t be a good thing, can it?

  39. Well Roseberry, you are largely correct.
    I should clarify that in cases such as myself, and many of my fellow Albertans, that the commies can’t succeed.
    I will ever and always resist.
    In the cases where Alberta has been pillaged and the loot has gone to other provinces, those provinces certainly are amenable to being engineered.
    After all, there were bought and they will likely stay bought until the loot runs out.

  40. We have a nice healthy stockpile of incandescents, too. Should last many years.
    Up yours, Suzuki!!

  41. Trust me when I say that disposing of them will soon be upon us. I was in Calgary for Xmas, my friend and I visted a lighting store. They informed us that LED is the wave of the future.
    My friend owns a small curio shop, she has now converted her store from spotlites to LED. Total electrical consumption, 90 watts. Life span of LED is 10 years of 24 hour lighting. Cost was about $280.00.
    The corkscrews are out. We had a hockey team come into our town this week. The bus was a new Mercedes with “LED” headlites. You have to see the brightness of the headlamps to see the potentiel for LED!

  42. Has this house been contaminated with mercury? Sounds like a reasonable question to ask when buying or selling a house. Perhaps the realtors should be adding this question to their legal disclosure sheets.
    Wonder what the sanctioned process is for cleaning up contamination from a broken mercury bulb? How do you get this stuff out of a carpet – particularly if you have kids crawling around.
    Would these levels of contamination be detectable in a commercial setting? and would a commercial enterprise be required to do something about it?
    Have not seen much in-depth investigation on this in the public discussion (media or blogosphere).
    Inquiring minds want to know.

  43. Toss in the landfill of course. What else would one do with the mercury filled monstrosities?
    Mind you once LED lights are affordable I’ll be glad to buy some but until then I’m stocking up on regular old edison style light bulbs.

  45. I have tried those lights and hated them. I tossed them in the trash.
    If my government wants to dictate what kind of light bulb am being forced to but (and from China) then I will show the same disrespect by letting it come back to haunt them in the garbage where I am certain I will not be the only one who doesn’t give a shit about this insanity of saving the planet.
    I have since bought a lifetime supply of incandescent bulbs.
    Consider this. In North America we no long have the ability to make light bulbs. What happens if for some reason China cannot or will not supply us with their twisty bulbs. How long before we are lighting candles?
    We should be making anything and everything that can be construed as a necessity right here in North America. We should know by mow that we cannot trust our transient friends/enemies.

  46. Did you LED fans know that LEDs are made from rare earth elements, and the sole source of REEs on the planet right now is…
    …wait for it…
    …China.
    But yeah, they are good.

  47. Had one of those CFL’s toast our hanging light; took days to clear that burnt-electronic smell out of the room. Never another one in our house!! They don’t work worth spit outside in the shed at -30C either.
    We sure are looking forward to the LED technology to come.
    Just remember: if you send anything in the mail to your favourite federal politician, there’s no postage required.

  48. Bruce Strang: “but as to the short life of CFL’s, it appears they need the heat to escape”
    The knock against incandescents is that they provide heat along with the light and that’s a bad thing. To correct that, GE lobbied for new business opportunities, oops I mean to save the planet, and made a killing getting CFLs mandated.
    But these non-heat producers produce so much heat that they burn out quickly in an enclosed fixture, something that didn’t happen with the heat-producing incandescents.
    Something tells me we’ve been fed a line of horse crap.

  49. I think I’ll take the next one that fails on me, put it in an old ratty backpack, and conveniently forget it in front of some enviro-kook establishment.
    Later, I’ll tune in to the Six O’clock News and watch the SWAT team, from behind cover fifty yards away, send in their remote controlled robot to blow the damn thing up. Then enjoy the equally stupid HAZMAT response.
    Then I’ll open another beer, sit back, and consider it all in all, a well-spent day!

  50. I may have played a small role in this. The CBC had an article about a ship being returned due to a leak of yellowcake. I made the observation that yellowcake is safer than twisty bulbs in that the yellowcake would be cleaned up and the twisty bulbs go into the landfill with mercury. It started something.
    Just trying to help.

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