As far as the recycled items go…. they get recycled…reused, not just dumped into the environment. Materials such as mercury are safely collected and reused in other devices that use mercury for instance. It’s easy to just type in mercury recycling or something similiar. I just found out today that plastic bottles can be recycled into sweatshirts (polyester is a type of plastic).

“We do not own the earth, we borrow it from our children.”

Let’s keep it clean for them…

And in the major part… the pollution, now mostly all kind of fluorescent lamps contains mercury, LEDs no… take a look http://www.mexled.com

=)

The eye disease now known as age-related macular degeneration used to be called senile macular degeneration because people suffered from it only in their old age, typically in their eighties or nineties, and more rarely in their seventies [1]. Over the past two or three decades, however, this degeneration of the central retina began to start earlier and earlier in the lives of the victims, to the point where millions of Americans now lose their central vision to it in their sixties and fifties, and sometimes already in their forties. Meanwhile, age-related macular degeneration has also become the most common cause of irreversible vision loss in the Western world [2].

One of the major factors responsible for macular
degeneration appears to be the lifetime accumulation of
damage in the retina’s photoreceptors from exposure to
harmful light which gradually builds up a layer of debris from destroyed photoreceptors between the remaining ones and so uses up the limited renewal capacity of these [3, 4].

As established by many industrial safety studies, the most
harmful light for mammalian eyes is in the blue to violet range, with wavelengths from 430 to 440 nanometers. Unfortunately, fluorescent lamps emit a large portion of their total energy in a narrow spike at 435.8 nm, precisely in the most eye-damaging region. Adult humans are somewhat protected from this damage because our lens yellows with age, just as varnish does, and for the same reason of slow oxidation by free radicals created through long-term irradiation with light. This yellowing filters out much of the blue and violet from about our early twenties on, but these harmful wavelengths can freely penetrate into the still more transparent eyes of children. There they can cause an accelerated buildup of destroyed photoreceptors which diminishes the capacity of these to self-repair and so ultimately leads to the degeneration of the macula in later years.

It is therefore probably no coincidence that the non-senile
people who now experience the much earlier onset of macular degeneration are the first generation who spent much of their youth under fluorescent classroom lamps. The issue has not been studied officially, so there is presently no proven link between this early unprotected exposure to the most damaging light in the visible spectrum and the earlier
appearance of the damage generally connected with this type
of exposure. On the other hand, basic logic and elementary
prudence suggest to limit this potentially harmful irradiation of your children’s retinae until its long-term safety has been
established [5].

However, the current proposals to replace all incandescent
lamps with fluorescent ones for their energy savings ignore
this potential risk. Despite the best of intentions among those
who make these proposals, this insufficiently evaluated
technology could therefore bite back, like the once equally
touted DDT or chlorofluorocarbons, and cause much more
damage down the road than it appears to prevent now. If the
early exposure of children to fluorescent light in classrooms is a factor in the later observed accelerated degeneration of their maculae, as the circumstantial evidence suggests, then exposing them also at home to that eye-damaging light is likely to make their vision fail even earlier than that of their parents and grand-parents in the current epidemic of early-onset macular degeneration.

Unfortunately, the medical community is so vested in falsely denying the obvious blinding danger from the overly bright neonatologist-specified fluorescent nursery lamps to the eyes of premature babies [6] that it completely ignores the potential danger from the same lamps to that much larger population of all children. Indeed, none of the experts or agencies charged with assuring the health and safety of our children have issued any public warnings about the potential long-term effects of exposing children to now even more fluorescent light. They are not just asleep at the switch, they don’t even want to admit that it exists. But if you care about the future visual health of your children, evaluate the evidence yourself and form your own opinion.

Respectfully submitted,
H. Peter Aleff
prevent@retinopathyofprematurity.org

[1] David Miller: “Clinical Light Damage to the Eye”, Springer
Verlag, New York, 1987, pages 79-125.

[2] Henry Grunwald: “Losing Sight”, The New Yorker,
December 9, 1996, pages 62-67.

[3] David Miller: “Clinical Light Damage to the Eye”, Springer
Verlag, New York, 1987, see particularly pages 102 ff. in
chapter 6 on “Phototoxic Changes in the Retina” by John Weiter, pages 79-125.

[4] Waxler M and Hitchins VM, editors: “Optical Radiation and Visual Health”, CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida, 1986,
Chapter 6: “Optical Radiation and the Aged Eye” by Marshall
J, Greenstein V, Kline D, Owsley C, and Werner JS. See
Introduction and page 118 middle to bottom.

[5] For details, see retinopathyofprematurity.org/
maculardegeneration01.htm

[6] See my “Fake Science and Bogus Bioethics: Medical
Research Frauds against Premature Babies”, Medical Veritas,
Volume 4:1, pages 1378- 89, posted at
http://retinopathyofprematurity.org/01summary.htm

Another one of my concerns is the lack of a recycling plan for household batteries and electronics–something spiercy mentioned. I have a large coffee can full of old batteries and, until recently, I didn’t know what to do with them. I have heard that Batteries Plus and all Walgreens will take them, although I haven’t verified this.

An idea I have for battery recycling is to require battery manufacturers to use packaging that can be reused to ship the used batteries back to a central recycling facility, postage paid. We’d pay extra up front for the postage, but I’d be willing to pay for it.

Here at our local recycling center they have no program to cope with truly dangerous items like FL’s, CFL’s, non ROHS compliant electronics, batteries, etc…. The overwhelming amount of recycling efforts focus on …..things that aren’t an environmental impact, or have a minimal one. If the government is going to take billions of our tax dollars to subsidize the unprofitable recycling industry, then focus on items that should be recycled. The impact of paper recycling? Worse than not recycling. The impact of plastic recycling? Pretty much moot.

Aluminum? A good idea….and about the only one.

The rest? Backed up by sensationalism, green-speak, “feel good” politics, and bad science.

The money spent on recycling should be spent on common disposable items that have a truly negative environmental impact. Batteries… CFL’s…Non ROHS compliant electronics.

Throw the rest into landfills until there are real impacts and until technology improves enough to make recycling as it exists more than just a pointless money pit.

Note: If you live in California, all Wal-Mart stores will be working with the California Take-It-Back Partnership accepting fluorescent lamps from customers for no charge during a one-day event on June 23.