We have on several occasions on this site promoted the use of compact flourescent light bulbs. And for good reason; they use far less energy than an incandescent bulb and last much longer. However, as we’ve also mentioned they do contain small amounts of mercury which is damaging to the environment. Luckily, some companies have made it easy to recycle these bulbs so that the mercury can be removed and used in future fluorescent bulbs. Sylvania, a maker of CFL’s, is one such company that offers a simple solution for recycling them. You purchase a kit on their website and fill it up with old, used CFL bulbs and then simply use the prepaid shipping label that comes with it to send it back. This allows you to avoid spending time looking for a local place that recycles them and you don’t even have to leave your home. They sell the kit for consumers which can fit about 12 small bulbs or 8 medium to large ones for $15. At first thought, you may think that spending the extra money to recycle these doesn’t seem to fit with our philosophy of saving money here at Greener Thinking. However, even adding in the extra cost of recycling these CFL’s, they still save you a lot of money in energy costs in the long run. 

Here is a list of additional info on recycling CFL’s… 
Lamp Recycling 
EPA 
Earth 911 

-LINKS-

Compact Flourescent Light Bulbs 
Sylvania 
RecyclePak 
Lamp Recycling 
EPA 
Earth 911

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 10:06 pm and is filed under Recycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.