Our family has really had our eyes opened to the effects of mercury because
a growing body of evidence links mercury to the epidemic of autism. 
Autistic affects 1 in 150 children and is devastating. Mercury is in
vaccinations in the form of thimerasol and in dental amalgam (silver)
fillings. It’s also in compact flourescent lighting. 

EcoLEDs launched an energy efficient replacement bulb for 40 watt light
bulbs; uses only 5 watts of electricity and lasts 50,000 hours. Here’s a
quote from the website about them: “This small, simple light can help
consumers greatly reduce their environmental footprint while helping prevent
global warming,” said EcoLEDs founder Mike Adams, an outspoken advocate of
natural health and environmental protection. “They represent a new era in
environmentally friendly lighting, and they make incandescent lights and
fluorescent lights virtually obsolete.”

The $500 Light Bulb

But what if the price of the light bulb at the store included the entire
cost of the electricity needed to actually power the light bulb? If that
incandescent light bulb actually lasted 50,000 hours like LED lights do,
the cost of buying the bulb together with all the electricity needed to
power it would be a whopping $500!. Would you pay $500 for a light bulb?

Of course, incandescent lights don’t last 50,000 hours. They last only
about 1,000. Which means you have to buy fifty bulbs, replace them fifty
times and throw fifty burned out bulbs in the garbage, all while still
paying nearly $500 in electricity anyway. In other words, paying for 5
0,000 worth of light from an incandescent light bulb actually costs MORE
than $500!

That’s no bargain. Not by a long shot. Especially when a $100 ten-watt LED
light bulb can operate for 50,000 hours using only about $54 in electricity.
(We’re assuming 10 cents per kilowatt-hour for these calculations. Folks in
California are paying a lot more than that, but in some states, it’s less…

Would you rather pay $500 for light, or $154? If you love overpaying for
stuff, and destroying the environment, and piling more garbage onto landfill,
then keep buying incandescent light bulbs.They will raise your electricity
bills, fill your trash with shards of glass, use up natural resources and
accelerate global warming faster than any other light source on the planet
today.

Are Compact Flourescent Light Bulbs the Answer?

But what about CFLs? Everybody’s crazy about CFLs all of a sudden, it seems.
People know that CFLs use only about 1/3rd the electricity of incandescent
lights. Of course, they flicker and hum, and they take a long time to warm
up, but they do save on electricity compared to the extremely inefficient
incandescent light bulb. So what’s not to like about CFLs?

Mercury, for one thing, fluorescent lights contain mercury, period. It’s the
dirty little secret of the CFL industry. This is brought into your home, and
if you break a fluorescent light in your home, you are releasing a powerful
neurotoxic heavy metal in your home. Birth defects, neurodegenerative diseases,
developmental disorders, dementia… these have all been linked to mercury
exposure. It’s not even debated in the scientific literature.

Even doctors readily admit that mercury is extremely toxic to the human body.
(Dentists, of course, remain in bewildering denial and continue to place
mercury fillings into the mouths of children, seemingly oblivious to the
neurotoxicity of this extremely dangerous heavy metal… There’s enough mercury
in a single fluorescent light bulb to contaminate 7,000 gallons of fresh water.

I cringe to think about how much water could be contaminated by the recent
fluorescent light giveaway programs hosted by big box retailers like The Home
Depot, which gave away an astonishing 1 million fluorescent lights containing
approximately 3 million mg of mercury (that’s a whopping 3 kilograms of mercury!).
And on what day did they choose to distribute these toxic light bulbs all across
the country? Earth Day, of course! (It would all be rolling-on-the-floor
hilarious if not for all the deformed babies that will probably result from
widespread mercury contamination of our environment.

So why are people rushing out to buy mercury light bulbs and place them in their
homes? Because no one told them about the mercury, that’s why! Of the hundreds
of consumers I’ve talked to about this issue, very few (less than 4%) were aware
of the mercury in fluorescent light bulbs. Sure, it’s printed in microscopic text
on the packaging of CFLs, but nobody reads that. So most consumers keep on buying
mercury light bulbs and bringing them right into their homes and communities,
oblivious to the extremely hazardous materials found inside each light.

I launched EcoLED because I wanted to provide an eco-friendly alternative to toxic
CFLs and wasteful incandescent lights. My aim is to educate consumers about the
advantages of LED lights and make them so popular that even Wal-Mart starts selling
them, putting my own company out of business. I will only consider EcoLEDs.com a
meaningful success when LED lights are sold at mass merchandisers and incandescent
lights become a thing of the past. I hope The Home Depot stops giving away toxic
fluorescent lights and starts selling LED lights instead.

Isn’t it interesting how the U.S. government requires Energy Saver statistics to be
printed on washing machines, dryers and other household appliances, but NOT on
incandescent light bulbs (which are, by any measure, the least efficient household
appliances of all)? I think we should start with mandated labeling that shows the
lifetime cost of each bulb sold at retail so that consumers can start to see the
different in the total cost of ownership right there at the point of purchase.

Can People Do Math Anymore? 

That would, for the first time, make consumers acutely aware of what it costs them
to operate a light bulb, not to even mention the cost to the planet.

Changing light bulbs to LED lights is one of many ways to start making a difference
right now, but accomplishing it requires that the population can grasp concepts such
as total cost of ownership.

Condensed from original content at Natural News.