Today’s Washington Post posted a story about the closing of the last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States. The remaining 200 employees at the plant will lose their jobs. Incandescent light bulbs have been a target of the ‘global warming’ movement and will not be sold legally by 2014.
The article reports:
“Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China.”
Whoops. The irony here is that CFLs were developed by American engineers in the 1970s, but because they require more hand labor to manufacture, none of the major brands make CFLs in the United States–labor is cheaper overseas.
The article also reports:
“The company (GE) developed a plan to see what it would take to retrofit a plant that makes traditional incandescents into one that makes CFLs. Even with a $40 million investment and automation, the disparity in wages and other factors made it uneconomical. The new plant’s CFLs would have cost about 50 percent more than those from China, GE officials said.”
What the article does not mention is the fact that breaking a CFL bulb has complications. According to the Environmental Protection Agency these are the steps to be taken after breaking a CFL bulb:
Before cleanup: air out the room Cleanup steps for: Disposal of cleanup materials Future cleaning of carpeting or rug: air out the room during and after vacuuming
Do you really believe that the majority of Americans will be aware of or follow these directions? I may be out in left field here, but I suspect the accidental breakage and improper disposal of CFLs will do far more damage to the environment that continuing to use incandescent bulbs would ever do.