Bishop Hill Environmentalists trashing the environment
Mar 20, 2012 Greens The "Environmentalists Trash the Environment" theme is one I return to occasionally here at BH, and there's a splendid example in the latest edition of Der Spiegel. It concerns CFL lightbulbs, which are something of a personal bugbear simply because of their uselessness. But here's a new angle on the hypocrisy of CFLs.
Because of the mercury, throwing broken energy-saving light bulbs into the ordinary trash is of course prohibited. A waste disposal company from Nuremberg in southern Germany has invented a machine that carefully cuts apart each light bulb and sucks out the fluorescent material and mercury. The mixture is then packed into airtight bags and filled into blue, 300-kilogram barrels. The barrels are loaded onto a truck and taken to a former salt mine in the Harz Mountains of central Germany. Thus, the energy-saving light bulb ends up in an underground waste depot, where it will remain forever as contaminated waste.
It's not just lightbulbs though. Read the whole thing.
(H/T Alan, by email)
Reader Comments (55)
Whoever said conserving the environment would be straightforward ?
Nobody, Hengist.
But what exactly does "conserving" the environment do? And which "environment" are you talking about? And what exactly do you mean by "conserving"? And why would you want to "conserve" it anyway?
It seems unarguable that environmentalism is bad for the environment. The ecofascist knee-jerk habit of leaping to ill-considered action ahead of the evidence is the very worst kind of short termism imaginable.
It's Spiegel not Speigel. (Fixed- thanks. BH]
weird spelling ;-)
Hanging, drawing and quartering is too good for those who foisted the monstrosity of 'eco' god-damn light-bulbs on humanity.
1. They are so dim it hardly makes any difference when you turn them on. No wonder myopia is increasing.
2. Approximately fifteen Euros a bulb in France! Used to be one. Ditto on the myopia for the poor.
3. The above mentioned pollution.