Is your Low Voltage Lighting Choice really Good for the Environment?
If you’re an Earth lover who tries to stay at the forefront of everything technology brings up that uses less energy, you are likely concluded 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 do the snag. Not only they are energy-efficient, you tell yourself, they must be earth-friendly in another way also as the advertising tells you. There is a merely single little problem with that claim. LED lights aren’t earth friendly in the full sense of the term. They might not contain mercury like fluorescent strip lights and CFL’s do, but they surely 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 are already considering giving up LED’s to be nice to the planet, the scientists do not 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’re disposed of carelessly.
They’re 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 break through, not to mention to crush. Of course, they contain poisonous heavy metals; but they’re safely contained within those impregnable glass shells. As long as they stay in there, they are safe at 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 sort of fluorescent lamp can do to.
And naturally, there’s a different upside to going the LED way for your low voltage lighting needs. These last a stunningly long time. You will not actually use up your LED Christmas lights. Your LED flashlights or your LED indoor lights for years and years. However, once you do, of course, you do not prefer to really throw them into the trash. They’re still a poison-in-glass certainly. The government discovers that the danger to the environment diverges 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 very much 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 you spent LED lights like they were a 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.
