Green Meanie

Did I tell you that I am an environmentalist? No, really. I have been substituting CFL bulbs for incandescent bulbs at the house for quite a while now. I went to Sam’s and found these nifty little things for about $13.00.

I figured they would save me money. My wallet, which is near and dear to my heart, appreciates this.

But I knew there had to be a down side. Apparently, these things contain mercury. Yes, I said mercury, which everyone knows is the most deadly poison this side of Chernobyl. Some lady up in Maine broke one of these bulbs in her house and subsequently talked herself into a $2000 cleanup to fix it.

Now I’ve always been one to appreciate the environment. Heck I don’t even let the Horde throw their trash out the window. I’ll also admit that I have been party to some really poor environmental decisions.

For example, when I was working in the oil fields in East Texas, we had a substantial amount of crude oil spill into a creek. A pipeline busted and just filled that creek up with oil. Standard procedure for cleaning up a spill like that was to place booms in the creek below the spill to contain the oil, then take a vacuum truck and suck it all up. For some reason that I can’t recall, the decision was made to burn it off instead. So once the booms were in place, we pushed some dirt across the creek below the spill, poured diesel on the oil, and lit that baby. There’s nothing quite like watching a 1/2 mile of burning oil, then ½ mile of burning trees as those close to the creek caught fire. Luckily it had been raining, so only those adjacent to the creek burned. I bet the flames were three stories high. After the flames died out, we took bulldozers and scraped the mud and dirt out of the creek bed and hauled it off. By the time we were finished, the creek looked like those drainage canals in California right before they poured the concrete. Nasty.

Anyway, back to the subject. We used to find old switches in the oilfields from pumpjacks that were installed in the 40s. Those switches had little vials of mercury in them for making electrical connections. We’d break the vials and catch the mercury in pimento jars, then proceed to play with it. We would roll it across the table at home, shine dimes up with it, and generally just play with it. It’s cool.

But with the way people are about it these days, I’d think twice before I even admitted to breaking a CFL bulb with 5mg of mercury in it. The EPA might descend on you and make you tear down your house or something. Sissies. Just shut up and throw the glass away. If a little bit of mercury is going to kill you, you don’t have long for this earth anyway.

If, and this is strictly hypothetical, the wind blew my new blister pack of CFL bulbs off the top of my shopping cart and two of them broke, I would not tell anybody. I would furthermore, not take it to the hazardous waste collection site. I would simply put it in my trash can with all the other junk I throw out. A little mercury sure as hell isn’t going to make much difference in the College Station land fill.