Is your Low Voltage Lighting Choice really Goodfor the Environment?

Is your Low Voltage Lighting Choice really Goodfor the Environment?

If you are an Earth lover who tries to stay at the forefront of everything technology brings up that uses less energy, you're probably all over the low-voltage lighting solution that LED light bulbs promise to be. You're already favoring them in car headlamps, Christmas lights and whatever home lighting products you can snag. Not only are they energy-efficient, you tell yourself, they must be earth-friendly in other ways too as the advertising tells you. There is just one little problem with that claim. LED lights aren't earth friendly in the full sense of the term. They may not contain mercury like fluorescent strip lights and CFL's do, but they certainly do contain arsenic and lead. So what are you supposed to do? That's pretty poisonous stuff if it gets into the groundwater. If you're already considering giving up LED's to be nice to the planet, the scientists don't think you should be so hasty.

What makes low-voltage lighting choices like CFL's bad for the Earth is that the mercury they contain can easily get into the earth if they are disposed of carelessly. They are very fragile and can easily break. That's not the way it is with LEDs. Those are tough little glass beads that would take considerable force to crack, let alone to crush. Of course they contain poisonous heavy metals; but they are safely contained within those impregnable glass shells. As long as they stay in there, they're safe from harming the earth. And as far as saving the energy goes, not only do they beat the ordinary incandescent bulb, they go far beyond what any kind of fluorescent lamp can do to.

And of course there's another upside to going the LED way for your low-voltage lighting needs. These last a spectacularly long time. You won't actually run through your LED Christmas lights, your LED flashlights or your LED indoor lights for years and years. But once you do, of course, you don't want to actually throw them into the trash. They are still poison-in-glass of course. The government finds that the danger to the environment varies by the color of LED you have. As you would expect, the safest LEDs out there are the white ones. They have no arsenic or lead. The red ones (the kind you find in traffic lights), are pretty dangerous - they have a great deal of lead. If a small child were to be placed next to a broken red LED, the child could get cancer at one go.

The best policy in these things would be to always handle your spent LED lights like they were hazardous waste. If you have broken bulbs, you want to handle them with gloves on. As long as you stick to LED bulbs though, your low-voltage lighting needs should be pretty easily taken care of, and you should have your conscience clean about being responsible with the environment.

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