Lara Abrams Communications

What Price Energy?

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

Did you know that it only takes 4mg of mercury to contaminate up to 7,000 gallons of freshwater?

Each year an estimated 600 million fluorescent lamps are disposed of in U.S. landfills, amounting to 30,000 pounds of mercury waste. That’s enough to pollute nearly every lake, pond, river and stream in North America. It’s also, according to [www.lightbulbrecycling.com] almost half the amount of mercury emitted into the atmosphere by coal-fired power plants each year.

You have to consider the following: The EPA warns that “…Mercury has long been known to have toxic effects on human and wildlife…Mercury is a toxic, persistent, bio-accumulative pollutant that affects the nervous system…As it moves through the environmental media, mercury undergoes a series of complex chemical and physical transformations…” Yet the EPA’s Energy Star program is one of the major forces behind the push for CFLs.

If a product is illegal to throw in the garbage in some states because of the toxicity of the contents, and recycling locations are difficult if not impossible for consumers to get to in their busy lives…why are we purchasing these products?

Buy LEDs, people, not CFLs. We need to get the word out. LED manufacturers are doing everything they can to get consumers to think long term, knowing full well that if consumers change behaviors and buy LEDs instead of CFLs, we’ll all be helping to keep mercury out of landfills, keeping our future generations of children from the perils of living in areas tainted by mercury poisoning, and more.

Yes, we’ve been told CFLs are energy saving. But the energy savings touted by those pushing the benefits of CFLs misses the point entirely.

The environmental impact of millions of these bulbs ending up in landfills or incinerators negates any kind of positive environmental impact we’d otherwise see, when recycling opportunities and levels are virtually nonexistent, relatively speaking. And most consumers are generally left in the dark as to the perils of improper disposal as well as toxicity of CFLs.

Converting just 25% of U.S. lighting fixtures to LEDs would save $115 billion in utility costs; alleviate the need to build 133 new coal-burning power stations; reduce carbon emissions by 158 million metric tons and keep 5,700 pounds of airborne mercury per year from being released into the atmosphere. [US Department of Energy]

What are LEDs? LEDs are Light Emitting Diodes, made from semiconductor materials that emit light when an electrical current flows through them. They contain no mercury. And they produce much less heat than incandescent bulbs.

I spoke with one company recently whose CEO is on a mission to educate people about LEDs. The company has gone as for as to introduce the carbon-tagging of lightbulbs to raise consumers’ awareness of the carbon dioxide avoided by using an LED bulb. That company is Lamina.

Lamina is arguably the leading LED packaging technology and design firm in the market today, with a proprietary multi-layer substrate packaging solution for thermal management and interconnectivity.

Lamina introduced a product about a year ago that effectively was 1 inch in diameter and put out the same amount of light as a 60 watt incandescent bulb. Right now, says Frank Shinneman, Lamina’s CEO, Lamina is the first company in the industry with high intensity LED lighting arrays. Today, his firm offers the same product with an output equal to 175 watts, and it’s at least 5 times more efficient than incandescent bulbs. And Lamina’s also developed a socket compatible bulb that has the shape of a halogen track lamp, so you can pull out your halogen track lamp and pop in what looks very similar from Lamina in what is a very similar shape, running at far greater energy efficiency, with a higher SOL (soft edge lighting) quality.

“The key is…we have the ability to take the heat away from the chip. We don’t make the chip, but we make the thermal packaging - and we’re able to put the chips closer together, as a result, in a smaller space, drive them at a high power, and keep them cool. And LEDs are semiconductor devices – so if they overheat, they stop working well. Our underlying technology provides the ability to quickly get the heat away from the chip,” says Shinneman.

The reverberations of such technology are being felt across the lighting industry already; Shinneman says it’s no longer a matter of whether to convert product lines to LED in the lighting industry; it’s a question of how many product lines to convert.

Add to that the fact that Lamina’s come up with a Carbon Credit Tag that alerts consumers to how much carbon dioxide they will NOT be putting into the atmosphere by using the product. The Carbon Credit Company (3C) of Frankfurt, Germany stands behind Lamina’s tags, having certified their program. One Lamina bulb will save half a ton of carbon dioxide from being produced. Over 3 tons of CO2 will be saved by the use of one of Lamina’s TitanTurbo LED light sources.

And the savings for consumers, and retail alike? As Shinneman notes – “If you’re in SF or NYC, you can’t get away with NOT paying union wages – so you’ve got people earning 200 bucks an hour to change a bulb. A CFL will last you a year, a halogen lasts you 3 weeks. So the LEDs will last 12 years, in a retail situation. The savings is huge.”

The real danger here, Shinneman notes, “…is that CFL bulbs will last about 3 years. Total fluorescent recycling is estimated at less than 3%. So all those people disposing all those bulbs – it’s going to end up in a municipal dump. That means we’re going to have hundreds of millions of annual doses of mercury going into our landfills. LEDS don’t have any mercury. No mercury. No toxins. It lasts a long time. And then you were asking about policy changes. Certainly the governments of the world are saying damn the incandescents. And last year, Title 24 started putting restrictions on the total number of watts that could be put towards lighting in any new construction. So that pushes people to go into CFLs or LEDs. And we need to convince people to go into LED lighting.”

It seems obvious to me that buying a non-mercury containing, non-toxic form of lighting is the right thing to do.

So LEDs only, please.

For more information on Lamina: http://www.laminalighting.com/

Recent Lamina announcements of note:
Lamina Lighting Incorporated (Lamina), an innovator of LED lighting systems and technologies, today announced that the company’s LED lamps will be utilized in an energy efficiency initiative launched by RWE Rhein-Ruhr, the major regional energy company of the RWE Group. RWE ranks among Europe’s leading integrated electricity and gas companies and is one of the largest electricity producers in Germany.

For information on State Mercury-Containing Bulb (Lamp) Recycling Programs
http://www.epa.gov/bulbrecycling/live.htm

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Contact Lara Abrams

To contact Lara, please email her at lara@laraabrams.com or call 415 613 1704.