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CFL Lightbulb Update
Our campaign to provide a safe way to dispose of CFL lightbulbs has been a little slow
to get off the ground....Castle Hill News Agency threw our CFL bucket away....pah!
But that hasn't stopped us at all! Baulkham Hills Shire Council and Fuller Figure with Style at Castle Mall still have our CFL containers displayed and we have actually already collected a few bulbs from them. What we have done is improved community knowledge about the mercury in the bulbs and we're going to be putting some more containers out into the community and the local newspaper is going to run another story for us. We have also written a letter to the Manager of the Department of Environment and Water Resources, explaining the communities lack of knowledge about the negative environmental impacts CFLs have, but dissapointingly, we're two months on and have had no reply. Our mum spoke to the assistant of The Hon. Verity Lambeth, Minister for the Environment NSW, and we emailed something to her...but haven't heard a thing back, but we are hopeful as we've heard she's passionate about the environment. We also wrote to The Hon. Ian Macdonald, Minister for Energy, NSW and again, two months on and finally got a letter back saying it wasn't his problem. Hello? Light bulbs...Minister for Energy? Maybe not quite so 'honourable' after all! We will keep you posted! By Alastair Wadlow UPDATE! Yes, a big political shake-up in NSW. A new Premier - and that means that all the ministers get changed around. So....Minister for the Environment is now Carmel Tebbutt. Here we go again! |
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Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs
If you read about how these new energy saving bulbs contain toxic mercury and were worried, well, so were we!
So we built some containers out of card and have placed them in three locations in Castle Hill: Baulkham Hills Shire Council in Showground Rd Fuller Figure with Style at Castle Mall News Express at Castle Towers Fuller Figure with Style
News Express
The containers are just big enough to hold a few bulbs, but small enough to fit on a counter. They have a leaflet container too to hold the leaflets we wrote to tell people about the problems caused by the mercury in CFL's.
When our containers are full, we will take them to 'Cleanout' who are able to extract the mercury safely and recycle the rest of the bulb. 
We are writing to the Department of the Environment and hoping to get them to organise a National scheme of collecting these useful, but dangerous bulbs. Last year, Alastair presented a letter to the Minister (at the time) for the Environment, Mr. Malcolm Turnbull, from Planet Patrol asking that they look at this problem. You can see the letter by clicking here.
Why don't you write to your local council and ask them what they plan to do about disposing of CFL bulbs? You can read more about CFL's in our story 'Energy Saving Lightbulbs' in 'Articles'. Here are two newspaper articles about our efforts to let epople know about this problem: Teen Delivers His Message The Dark Side of Efficient Lighting |