Recycling options lag the compact fluorescent push

The city of Madison, Wis., requires retailers that sell the bulbs to also collect them for recycling, although stores can charge a fee for it. Maine and Vermont fund programs that distribute collection bins to retailers, from neighborhood hardware stores to Wal-Marts, and get the bulbs to recyclers, either by pickup or mail.

Pennsylvania spent $8,000 to distribute white plastic buckets to several dozen businesses, community organizations and local governments that wanted them. The buckets come with a seal-tight lid and the state pays the postage to send them to a recycler.

Two of the buckets are nestled among the expanding display of CFLs lined up on wall pegs at Ritters True Value Hardware in the central Pennsylvania town of Mechanicsburg, looking like something a store employee inadvertently left there while cleaning up -not a fledgling attempt to collect the bulbs for safe disposal.

Compact fluorescent bulbs each contain roughly 5 milligrams of mercury, which health professionals say is tiny in relation to the amount in a glass thermometer. Using that estimate, almost 2 tons of mercury were in the 380 million sold last year. By comparison, about 50 tons of mercury are spewed into the air each year by the nation's coal-fired power plants.

The longer fluorescent tubes, in use since World War II, contain slightly more mercury per lamp, but recyclers typically collect them in bulk from the biggest users, businesses and factories, which are required by federal law to dispose of them properly.

Even if recycling efforts have been meager, environmentalists and government officials say it is important to balance the positives of CFLs against any negatives.

For instance, CFLs can curtail the need for energy and thereby cut pollution from power plants. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a coal-fired power plant will emit about four times more mercury to keep an incandescent bulb glowing, compared with a CFL of the same light output.

"People should care about mercury and if they do, they should be working to save energy wherever they can and CFLs are a great answer to that," said John Rogers, a senior energy analyst for the Cambridge, Mass.-based group.

To recycle his spent CFLs, Rogers bags them, stores them in the basement and drops them off when his town, North Reading, Mass., holds a recycling event.

David Stotler, a railroad clerk from Maytown, Pa., does not know of a local option to recycle CFLs, so he threw out the one or two in his home that burned out.