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FACT SHEET - Fluorescent lamps, mercury and end-of-life management

Energy efficiency in lighting is a crucial component of the Australian Government's response to climate change. Considerable energy is wasted through inefficient lighting from many sources across Australia, including street lighting, homes, and office buildings. The Australian Government believes that these areas present obvious opportunities for significant energy savings.

The phase-out will deliver considerable savings to the environment and the economy. Across the country, the move to more efficient lighting, such as CFLs, is expected to save around 30 terawatt hours of electricity and 28 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions between 2008 and 2020. This is equivalent to permanently decommissioning a small coal-fired power station or taking more than 500,000 cars off the road permanently. It is expected to result in savings to the Australian economy of around $380 million per year by 2020 and result in net savings of more than $50 per year for each household that changes all of its incandescent light globes to CFLs.

Do fluorescent lamps contain mercury?

All fluorescent lamps including CFLs contain very small amounts of elemental mercury. Government and industry continue to work together to minimise the mercury content. A new standard will be introduced for CFLs that includes a maximum mercury content aligned with the European Commission standard at five milligrams (one two-hundredth of a gram) per bulb. The ordinary fluorescent tubes in current use contain approximately 15 mg per tube of mercury, consistent with the Australian Standard; these have been used safely in most commercial and public buildings in Australia and around the world for over 40 years.

To put the amount of mercury contained in CFLs in context, five mg would fit on the tip of a ball point pen. The old mercury thermometers contain approximately 500 mg of mercury. With appropriate precautions regarding disposal in place, elemental mercury continues to be used safely in a variety of products including lamps, watch batteries, various medical instruments, and dental fillings.

How should I clean-up broken or spent fluorescent lamps?

The short term nature of the potential exposure (particularly after effective clean-up of broken CFL material) does not constitute a significant health risk to exposed adults (including pregnant women) or children.

Some members of the public have expressed concerns about the release of mercury from broken CFLs. The concentration of mercury vapour released by a broken CFL, when measured directly above the broken lamp, can for a brief amount of time exceed international guidelines for chronic exposure in ambient (outdoor) air. The term 'chronic' implies that the exposure is continuous over an extended period i.e. years. It is not appropriate to use these chronic guideline values when assessing possible risk from short term exposure to mercury from CFLs. A broken CFL can provide amounts of elemental mercury vapour which could reach a comparable value to that from dental amalgam fillings in adults, especially if not cleaned up. While the levels of exposure are similar, the timeframe for exposure arising from a broken CFL is likely to be much shorter.

However, following these simple and straightforward clean up and disposal instructions as a cautionary approach will further reduce risk:

• Open nearby windows and doors to allow the room to ventilate for 15 minutes before cleaning up the broken lamp. Do not leave on any air conditioning or heating equipment which could recirculate mercury vapours back into the room.
• Do not use a vacuum cleaner or broom on hard surfaces because this can spread the contents of the lamp and contaminate the cleaner. Instead scoop up broken material (e.g. using stiff paper or cardboard), if possible into a glass container which can be sealed with a metal lid.
• Use disposable rubber gloves rather than bare hands.
• Use a disposable brush to carefully sweep up the pieces.
• Use sticky tape and/or a damp cloth to wipe up any remaining glass fragments and/or powders.
• On carpets or fabrics, carefully remove as much glass and/or powdered material using a scoop and sticky tape; if vacuuming of the surface is needed to remove residual material, ensure that the vacuum bag is discarded or the canister is wiped thoroughly clean.
• Dispose of cleanup equipment (i.e. gloves, brush, damp paper) and sealed containers containing pieces of the broken lamp in your outside rubbish bin - never in your recycling bin.
• While not all of the recommended cleanup and disposal equipment described above may be available (particularly a suitably sealed glass container), it is important to emphasise that the transfer of the broken CFL and clean-up materials to an outside rubbish bin (preferably sealed) as soon as possible is the most effective way of reducing potential contamination of the indoor environment.

How do I dispose of compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) at the end of their working life?

At present, CFLs can generally be disposed of in regular garbage bins - where the garbage goes to landfill. You should check with your local authority, responsible for garbage collection, as to its advice on disposal of CFLs as different local authorities may have different arrangements. For example, some garbage is sent to waste processors and this may change the arrangements for disposal. Should you choose to dispose of your CFLs this way then it's best to wrap them in newspaper to prevent them from breaking.

You should not place CFLs in your kerbside recycling collection because they can break during transport and contaminate recyclable items. Several states have household chemical collection programs or drop off points that accept CFLs for recycling. Other states are considering introducing similar schemes.

Detailed information about disposal and recycling, developed with the assistance of the states and territories is available at www.environment.gov.au/settlements/waste/lamp-mercury.html.

Less mercury is released to the environment through the use of CFLs

Less mercury is released into the environment from the use of CFLs than incandescent lamps even though CFLs contain mercury. This is because burning coal to produce electricity releases mercury from power stations. CFLs use only about 20 per cent of the electricity which incandescent bulbs use to produce the same amount of light. Overall approximately 20 per cent of the coal needs to be burnt to produce the same amount of light, resulting in an overall reduction in mercury emissions of about 80 per cent. Even when the amount of mercury contained in a CFL is taken into account, the savings in mercury emitted to the environment (through power production) mean that the amount of mercury released over the life of a CFL is significantly less than the amount that would be released by burning coal to power equivalent incandescent bulbs over the same period.

About 53 per cent of Australia's electricity is produced by burning black coal and about 21 per cent from the burning of brown coal. Burning coal releases mercury as a gas into the atmosphere. Black coal contains about 0.1g of mercury per tonne (but it can vary significantly between coal fields). The value for brown coal is less certain because detailed measurements have not been made in Australia (Nelson 2006), but it is probably about the same as black coal (Pacyna et al. 2006).

Mercury in gas and oil is much less. Power stations burning black coal remove significant amounts of mercury from their flue gases but because of the nature of brown coal, it is much harder to remove the mercury from power stations using it (Nelson 2006, Pavlish et al. 2004). Power stations are also slowly improving their removal of mercury from emitted gases over time (Pacyna et al. 2006). Mercury released into the atmosphere by burning various fuels is shown in the figure (NPI 2008 and Pacyna et al. 2006).

Figure 1: Provides a comparison of the amount of mercury emitted into the atmosphere per kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity.

A 20 watt (W) CFL typically lasts for about 8000 hours (hrs) and uses 160 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity during its use. The equivalent 100W incandescent lamp lasts typically only 2000hrs and so four lamps are required to do the same job as single CFL. The incandescent lamps use 800kWh of electricity. So 640kWh of electricity is avoided by using a CFL. A CFL would be responsible for releasing about 2.7mg of mercury into the atmosphere, whereas the equivalent incandescent would be responsible for releasing about 13.4mg of mercury.

If there is a maximum of 5 mg of mercury contained in a compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) as this is also assumed to be released into the atmosphere as a result of a breakage during disposal, this is also added to the amount of mercury that is released from coal. However, overall significantly less mercury is released into the atmosphere through the use of compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), as shown below in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Provides a comparison of the amount of mercury emitted into the environment from the production and use of a CFL compared to that of an incandescent lamp.

However, not all of the 5 mg of mercury contained in the lamps is released into the environment because up to 60 per cent is chemically bonded to the other parts of the lamp such as the phosphor powder or the glass (Dunmire et al. 2003).

A recent life cycle analysis which compared a CFL and an equivalent incandescent bulb also took into account the energy used to manufacture and transport the bulbs and concluded that this energy was only about 2 per cent of the energy used during their lives. It also considered other environmental impacts but concluded that the impact due to energy use dominated all other impacts (Parsons 2006).