The Stinky Bulb

It sizzled like a firework and finished off with a muffled "pop". Then, it infused the darkened room with a burnt plastic odor. One of my compact fluorescent bulbs just expired, and I'm a little disappointed.

I haven't performed a side-by-side comparison, but I sense I got shortchanged on the promise that the bulb would last 6 to 8 times longer that the standard incandescent bulb. It's not the first time one blew out prematurely, but as an early adopter of the technology, I'm willing to cut the manufacturers some slack. After all, they have not exactly been sitting on their duffs. Since I started using the bulbs three years ago, compact fluorescent bulb (CFL) manufacturers have come out with all sorts of product improvements. Now, CFLs come in many shapes and sizes from candles to flood lights. Some are even dimmable or are 3-way for lamps with three brightness settings. They also come in several warmer colors so you don't look like death under them. You can search through these different kinds at ENERGY STAR's website.

These innovations reflect CFL manufacturers' abilities to respond to customer concerns, except that I still have to deal with my burnt out bulb. I could put it out with the trash, but recycling CFLs is preferred over trashing them because each bulb contains about 5 milligrams of mercury. Mercury is a bioaccumulative neurotoxin that causes birth defects, brain damage, and the severe mental problems that gave Alice in Wonderland's Mad Hatter his name. Mercury-containing bulbs that end up in the trash have a better chance of releasing their mercury to the environment than do bulbs that are sent for recycling, yet most of us still trash them. The Association of Lighting and Mercury Recyclers estimates that the residential bulb recycling rate in the US is only about 2%. Perhaps this is because recycling CFLs is not as easy as putting them out with your old newspapers for pick up. Mercury is toxic, so in the US mercury-containing bulbs are treated as hazardous or universal waste and require special handling and recycling techniques. Nevertheless, it is still possible for a household to recycle CFLs. Below are some examples of how to do it.

• Plug your zip code in and Earth 911 will tell you where to go to recycle all kinds of household hazardous wastes including CFLs.
  
• The Lamp Recycle website lists companies that handle fluorescent bulbs and has information about state and federal regulations regarding mercury containing bulbs.
• Check your local waste handling facility; they likely have household hazardous waste drop off days. For example, in New York City you can go to one of the self-help special waste drop-off sites. There are five, one for each borough. Kill two birds with one stone and get rid of your old batteries at the same time.
  
• The Northwest Product Stewardship Council is an excellent group that is working with businesses to make recycling CFLs as easy as going to the hardware store to buy a replacement bulb.
  
• Association of Lighting and Mercury Recyclers is a trade organization that has educational outreach programs for mercury containing bulb recycling. They also have information about recycling by state.
• Buy a CFL recycling kit from a company like LightBulbRecycling.com and mail them your spent bulbs.
• Bring your bulbs to an IKEA store for recycling and consider encouraging Wal-mart to provide the same service.
  

After over a hundred years of incandescents, the penetration of CFLs into the residential lighting market demonstrates that we are willing to accept a product that meets a higher energy efficiency standard, despite a temporary drop in performance. We accepted the new technology, asked for improvement, and manufacturers responded.

Similarly, by recycling CFLs and asking our suppliers to recover the mercury, we acknowledge the downsides of this new technology and encourage innovations that address them. If CFLs end up in the trash, we simply shift the environmental burden to our solid waste.

Related articles:
Red is for fire, earlier post
Lighter footstep, March 1, 2007 by Chris Baskind
The Green Guide, February 21, 2007 by Emily Main
NPR, February 15, 2007 by Elizabeth Shogren
Northwest Energy News, January 31, 2007 by Vicki Fulbright Calwell

Our Mid-oil Crisis

We are finite. We know at some point we will run out of time. But when we are young, we act like we will live forever, and we do things we may regret later. Half way through life, we start to realize our limitations. We may look back disappointed with the time we’ve wasted and look forward anxious to make the remaining time meaningful. Some of us emerge with sports cars or mistresses, others with renewed purpose and new possibilities.

On this planet, our oil supply is finite. So far we’ve been using it like teenagers, like we will have oil forever. But we are slowly realizing we might be half way through it, and we are starting to regret the pollution and global warming our oil burning is causing. Looking back we accomplished a lot with oil, from powering our economic growth to making plastics that have transformed our way of life. Looking forward we see a need to find substitutes that don’t burden the planet. There are some who are ready to take on this challenge and others who don’t think we should just yet.

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed on January 23, 2007, Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a venture capitalist, called to unleash our entrepreneurs and researchers to develop biofuels. He asserted that if we set policies to build a market for alternatives to oil, in ten years we can transform how we use and fundamentally think about energy. He is so clear and committed to this possibility, he’s bet on it with his own time and money.

In another Wall Street Journal op-ed published on January 18, 2007, Flemming Rose and Bjorn Lomborg challenged Al Gore to a verbal duel over how to handle global warming. They did not deny its existence, or its anthropogenic sources. Instead they disputed some of the facts Al Gore uses in his message, ultimately concluding that the impacts of global warming do not justify the investment to fight it. They argued, “we will live in a warmer but immensely richer world."

Energy is integral to most everything we do; it is vital to our way of life. In the US, oil accounts for 40% of our total energy consumption, which is sobering when you consider we may have already used half of world’s supply. We are at a turning point. We can choose to buy that sports car and push the snooze button as Rose and Lomborg suggest, or we can choose to embrace the possibility of a new energy platform that will take us further than the remaining oil we have could.

Sources:
Wall Street Journal Thursday, January 18, 2007, page A16 "Will Al Gore Melt?"
Wall Street Journal Tuesday, January 23, 2007, page A18 "The War on Oil"
EIA Petroleum Products Information Sheet

Plants fart too?

Methane is the simple organic compound in natural gas. In the US, we use it primarily as a fuel for cooking, heating, and generating electricity. When you fire up your gas stove or gas fireplace, the gas you are probably burning is methane. You may also use it to heat your water and even your home. In the US, about 20% of our electricity is generated by burning natural gas or methane.

Methane is also a greenhouse gas. When it is in the atmosphere it absorbs heat and contributes to global warming. In its publication Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) proposed that as a greenhouse gas methane is over 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide when you compare their heat-absorbing abilities over a hundred years. This suggests that from a global warming perspective, every ton of methane in the atmosphere is like having over 20 tons of carbon dioxide. That's like wearing 20 pairs of thermal underpants instead of just one.

If you've seen Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, you've seen how historical atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and global temperatures trend closely together. A similar chart from the IPCC's report shows how methane closely follows the same trend, implying a similar relationship.

Gore continued the historical carbon dioxide trend to the present day, suggesting that we have added so much to the atmosphere we are now "off the chart". IPCC's report shows how we are off the chart with methane concentrations as well. From the first graph you can see that over the last 400,000 years carbon dioxide concentrations cycled between 200 and 300 parts per million by volume (ppmv) and methane concentrations cycled between 350 and 700 parts per billion by volume (ppbv). From the second graph you can see that over the last 200 years, carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) concentrations have gotten up to 360 ppm and 1750 ppb, respectively. Compared to the peaking concentrations over the past 400,000 years, current concentrations for carbon dioxide are 20% higher and methane concentrations are 150% higher. (IPCC also presents concentrations of nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas, which have also increased over the last couple hundred years, but we'll tackle that in another entry.)

So where does all this methane come from? Methane is a product of anaerobic digestion, or digestion in the absence of oxygen. This happens in landfills where below the surface microbes break down the organic material in garbage. Anaerobic digestion also occurs inside animals as they process food. Because of our farming practices a significant source of methane comes from livestock. Cows and other ruminants burp up so much methane that the EPA estimates this makes up about 20% of anthropogenic (human caused) methane emissions.

There are also natural sources of methane, again from digestive processes including microbial breakdown of organic material in wetlands and breakdown of cellulose in termites. And yes, another source, a trivial source, is flatulence from other animals like you and me. (Please note, however, methane in its pure form is an odorless gas.)

These are all anaerobic processes, but another natural source of methane that caught scientists off guard was reported about a year ago by Keppler et. al. in their article in Nature. Their studies shook traditional assumptions showing that methane was produced by plants under aerobic (oxygenated) conditions. They also proposed that the amount of methane from plants was a significant contribution to the amount of methane emitted from natural sources.

Considering methane's bad boy rap and that the Kyoto protocol promoted reforestation to combat global warming, folks started questioning whether planting trees was a good or bad idea. Even in that same volume of Nature, David Lowe authored a commentary on the study and suggested that it may be possible that reforestation may do more harm than good with respect to global warming. He also suggested that the anthropogenic source of methane from ruminants could be equivalent to the methane generated if the land the livestock grazed were forested.

But don't pave the rainforest yet! Since the study and the commentary were published, several papers have been written to support the idea that despite their new found methane contribution, plants and forests do not contribute to global warming. Kelliher et. al. argued that emissions from grazing animals are about ten times higher than the emissions from that land if it were forested. Using Keppler's data, Kirschbaum et. al. calculated only a quarter of the global plant emissions Keppler had reported. The original authors themselves even responded with their own press release and again more recently in next month's issue (Feburary 2007) of Scientific American to clarify the interpretation of their findings. They calculated that the net global warming benefit from trees and forests are lessened by just 1 to 4% because of the methane they emit, even after accounting for methane's higher potential as a greenhouse gas.

Keppler et. al. reported on a frequently overlooked phenomenon in nature. There are still questions about the mechanism for how plants generate methane under aerobic conditions and what contributions plants made historically to atmospheric methane concentrations. But what Keppler's study has not changed that methane concentrations in the atmosphere have more than doubled over the last two hundred years thanks to anthropogenic sources like landfills, natrual gas systems, and livestock.

Carbon dioxide may be the single largest contributor to global warming, so it gets the most attention, but methane is not too far behind (no pun intended). To be clear, you can blame this on your furnace, but not on your ficus.

Graphics from IPCC website.
First graphic, Climate Change: The Scientific Basis, Chapter 2, Figure 2.22
First graphic, Climate Change: The Scientific Basis, Summary for Policy Makers, Figure 2a

Sources:
National Geographic article
EPA's Methane factsheet
Wikipedia article on methane
Wikipedia article on global warming potential or GWP
Wikipedia article on radiative forcing

If you said it was May, I'd believe you

It's about 65 degrees this morning and I'm sipping my caffeinated beverage of choice, a chai tea latte, thinking maybe I should have gotten an iced coffee. I mention this to Guy, who's working the counter at the local coffee shop I go to. Nodding his head, he says he had already gotten some orders for iced drinks today. "Global warming," chimes in another worker behind the counter, "I did my run in just shorts today!"

On my walk home from the coffee shop, I overhear a conversation about cherry trees in Brooklyn blooming. Later I go for my own run in Central Park where I see a small crowd taking pictures of a tree that thinks it's spring.

New York City is abuzz about the weather. And it's no wonder, with the temperature hovering around 70F and the humidity above 80%, it feels more like May than January. It's hard to be down about it. A couple of days ago I was talking with a contractor who works predominately outdoors. He said, "If this is global warming, bring it on!"

The unseasonably hot weather seems to make the idea of global warming real. But if public acceptance of its validity is dependent on the local weather forecast, it might not last. I can recall during the serious snow storms from the last couple of winters folks holding their shovels saying just the opposite, "What global warming?" or "Global warming, my ass!" Who's to say that if we see temperatures in February that put Antarctica to shame, the public opinion of global warming won't end back up in the, "yeah, right" pile.

One problem with believing or disbelieving in global warming based on current outdoor temperatures is that the phenomenon is geographically global not local. The northeast US is having a mild winter, but Denver is getting clobbered by snow storms. Another problem is that global warming is also a long term trend, not something proven in a season, a year, or even a decade. It is not about sporadic temperature rises of 40 degrees F in New York City. It's about the average temperature of the entire planet creeping up by a couple of degrees over the next couple of decades, and about 10 degrees in the next century.

Attributing local heat waves solely to global warming could jeopardize the credibility of the theory, which in turn could jeopardize sustained support to address the problem.

Picture: 6Jan07 - Folks in NYC's Central Park taking pictures of a tree in full bloom.
Sources:
Wikipedia on Global Warming
UNEP Climate Statistics
International Herald Tribune 4Jan07

Lighting the Way

In today's Business section, the New York Times highlighted Wal-mart's efforts to push the not-so-popular compact fluorescent light bulbs or CFLs as part of its broader initiative to get green. The bulb's advocates claim it is environmentally superior to the more familiar incandescent bulb because CFLs use a third to a quarter of the energy for the same amount of light and the bulb itself lasts up to ten times longer.

Aesthetics aside, there are tradeoffs. The main environmental strike against the energy efficient bulbs is that each one contains about five milligrams of mercury; incandescents don't contain any mercury. Mercury is a heavy metal that bioaccumulates, which means that once it gets into an animal it tends to stay there. This results in increased concentrations of mercury in animals higher in the food chain (eg. humans). Mercury can damage the nervous system and causes birth defects. For these reason, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has strict regulations about mercury emissions from chemical and power plants. It is also why there has been a push for years to get mercury out of common household items like thermometers and thermostats.

So why is the mercury in compact fluorescents acceptable? The EPA claims that because the CFLs consume less energy, less electricity has to be generated to power the bulb. Less electricity means less coal is burned to produce the electricity. Less coal means less mercury is emitted from coal power plants. The result is that the amount of "mercury savings" from the power plant is greater than the mercury contained in the bulb. According to the numbers given by the EPA, it's about a 30% savings.

But an analysis of the energy efficiency to mercury tradeoff is not that simple. With the additional complexity of a CFL bulb, how much more energy is required to make them? With the increase in weight per bulb how much more energy is required for transport? How much mercury, if any, is emitted in the manufacturing of CFLs? How much mercury does coal burning emit? Even this last question is not simple to answer. It depends on factors such as the type of coal burned and how well the mercury released is captured by control devices. The type and effectiveness of the control device may depend on the age of the power plant and the federal and state environmental regulations it is subject to. Also, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) only about half our electric power in 2005 came from coal. It is not apparent that these considerations have been included in EPA's 30% mercury savings estimates.

Not all the mercury in CFLs will necessarily find a way directly to the environment. The EPA recommends that consumers bring expired CFLs to a recycling center for mercury recovery. But if it is taking Wal-mart, a giant in retail marketing, so much energy to get folks to simply buy the bulbs, what kind of heroic effort would be required to get folks to go to their recycling centers with the old bulbs? It is likely that some percentage of these bulbs and the mercury in them will end up in a landfill or in an incinerator, giving the mercury a potential pathway into the food chain.

This is not to say CFLs are bad, or that Wal-mart's intentions are ill placed. With the energy saved with CFLs, there is the added benefit of fewer emissions of the other pollutants generated from power plants - nitrous oxides, sulfur oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, and carbon dioxide from non renewable sources, to name a few.

So what is the answer? A technical analysis, such as a life cycle assessment (LCA), can be used to compare the environmental impacts of the two bulb technologies. However, the results will be limited to the analysis' scope and will be as accurate as the data and the assumptions used to build it. Then there are social and commercial impacts that are more difficult to quantify. In their current incarnation and use, compact fluorescent bulbs are more energy efficient than their incandescent cousins, but they are not yet sustainable. Getting to sustainability, however, is an ongoing process and CFLs could be a transitional technology along the path to sustainability. For instance, Wal-mart's goal of increasing CFL sales may promote industry competition, generating even more research into energy efficient technologies. This research could lead to other types of lighting that contain less hazardous materials. With the public awareness of energy efficiency created by the promotion of CFLs, these next generation technologies could be adopted more quickly and the next step toward sustainability taken. So there is no clear and single answer, there is a path. And the next time you walk down the lighting isle at a Wal-mart store looking to replace a bulb, what you'll find is a fork in the road.

Sources:
Wikipedia Compact Fluorescent Lamp entry
EPA on mercury
EPA's Energy star on CFLs
Mercury Technology Services website

"What is biodiesel?"

That was the question to one of the answers on last night’s broadcast of Jeopardy, demonstrating the fuel has reached a new level in mainstream consciousness. No doubt due, in part, to promotions by celebrities like Willie Nelson, who has his own brand of biodiesel, or Prince Charles, who is working on his own fleet of vehicles running on B100. But did you know that biodiesel actually started out as a grassroots effort?

Biodiesel did not come out of intense study by well endowed universities. Biodiesel was not the result of an international chemical company’s research. Biodiesel did not come from royalty or country western singers. Biodiesel came out of regular people’s garages. Regular people bought tanks and tubing, got waste oil from local restaurants, made their own fuel, and ran their cars on it.

In this day and age, rarely is there a chemical industry that starts at home. You might get a rock band or a dot com, but thanks to the support of biodiesel cooperatives and clubs, home “brewers” of biodiesel have a place to learn and share and develop their “craft”.

Just as before the pub, beer was brewed at home, biodiesel "brewing" has become a home activity, especially for folks concerned about the environment. Now you can buy biodiesel kits, take biodiesel-making classes, or attend biodiesel brewing parties complete with wine and cheese. Some folks even spike their fuel with essential oils like lavender and rosemary, so that it burns with a pleasant after-nose.

Running diesel engines on something other than petroleum is not a novel idea. At the end of the 19th century the inventor of the diesel engine, Rudolph Diesel, used biodiesel to show off his creation to the world. The chemistry for making biodiesel has been known for even longer. But when petroleum was popularized in the twenties, #2 fuel oil or "diesel" pushed the vegetable oil-based fuel out. Biodiesel began its slow resurgence along with wood stoves and thermal envelope homes during the energy crisis in the 1970's, mostly as a homemade fuel.

Thirty years later, we are in the middle of another turning point for biodiesel. Home-brewed beer begot Budweiser and Corona. Similarly, the commercialization of biodiesel production is promising a steadier, better quality supply for a larger market. According to the National Biodiesel Board, 75 million gallons of biodiesel were produced in 2005 and the 85 US biodiesel companies have a current combined capacity of 580 million gallons per year, which will grow to 1.4 billion gallons per year by 2008. A small but noticeable dent in our annual diesel consumption of 40 billion gallons per year for on-road vehicles.

Commercialization is also changing the face of biodiesel culture. It's no longer just for biodiesel enthusiasts who care about the environment. It's gotten the attention of entrepreneurs and investors looking for profits. It's gotten the attention of some regulators and policy makers skeptical of the fuel's promise for a better environment. This might sound harsh to those who have come to love the fuel, but it is part of biodiesel's transition from infancy to proving itself in a capitalist environment. To have a significant impact on reducing our carbon footprint or on transforming our relationship with oil, it must go through the economic and regulatory rigor that will demonstrate its viability. You may argue, this commercialization is happening with the help of government subsidies, but petroleum had its share as well. And yes, you can also argue it is happening with the help of royalty and country western singers, and you'd be right.

References:
Common Ground Magazine December 2006: Wisdom on Wheels by Emily Dulcan
Biodiesel America .org
Bdpedia
EIA Website

The Earth's Solar Energy Bank Account

We are energy trust fund babies. We can chose to exhaust what we have or we can choose save it and pay our own way.

Most of our energy comes from burning fossil fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal. When we burn them, we are converting the chemical energy stored in the fuels into heat energy. We use this heat energy to heat our homes or convert it to electrical energy in our power plants or to mechanical energy in our cars. But the chemical energy in these fuels originally came from solar energy. Hundreds of millions of years ago, plants on the earth absorbed light energy from the sun and stored it as chemical energy. Then they died, got buried for millions of years under pressure and heat, and now we dig them up and use the energy they stored.

This description is quite simplified, but it still illustrates that our main source of energy took millions of years to make. We have been tapping into this huge store of energy we inherited, an energy bank account or trust fund, if you will. Deposits were made long ago and have been accruing interest. Now we are burning the savings, literally.

Over a hundred years ago, we withdrew a part of this energy account to invest in the Industrial Revolution. Thanks, in part, to this investment we developed new manufacturing and transportation methods, transforming our lifestyles completely. Since then we've fueled countless innovations and have made a considerable dent in our energy account in the process. This is especially true for crude oil. Many experts argue that we are near or have even passed our peak oil production rates. Though we are still discovering new oil deposits, they will be harder and more expensive to get to, and we'll burn more oil in doing so.

Since the Industrial Revolution, we have become complacent about our energy account and we are no longer really investing, just simply spending. We tend not to think of this energy account as a blessing or a “breathing spell”(1), but as a right or worse, a given.

To sustain our lifestyles and set aside a “safety net” for the future, we must work toward controlling our spending through energy efficiency and finding other income streams. These income streams could come from the energy we currently get from the sun instead of the energy the sun provided millennia ago. The sun provides light energy we can to convert to electrical energy with our photovoltaics and wind and water turbines or to chemical energy with our biomass crops. Perhaps at some point we could generate more energy than we consume and recharge our energy account.

We might have needed the silver spoon a hundred years ago, but we've outgrown it by now.


1. Reference to quote by “the First and Greatest Chemurgist” George Washington Carver: “I believe the Great Creator has put oil and ores on this earth to give us a breathing spell... As we exhaust them, we must be prepared to fall back on our farms, which is God’s true storehouse and can never be exhausted. For we can learn to synthesize materials for every human need from the things that grow.”