The Cato Review of Business & Government
The Cato Review of Business & Government
Jonathan H. Adler is the Director of
Environmental Studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
The federal government wants you to use fluorescent lighting. Under the Green Lights program established in 1991, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been encouraging corporations and other participants to commit to installing fluorescents and other high efficiency lighting products whenever such investments are "profitable." According to the EPA, "If Green Lights were fully implemented in all facility space in the United States, it would save over 65 million kilowatts of electricity annually, reducing the national electric bill by $16 billion per year." The greater use of energy efficient lighting would also reduce power plant emissions of sulfur dioxide, mercury, and other pollutants.
In the past five years, a few hundred companies have signed on to the program. The EPA provides a range of "participant support programs," including taxpayer-funded technical assistance and green publicity. The agency provides participants with" ready-to-use promotional materials" to celebrate the program and has promised to "aggressively publicize successful Green Lights corporations."
Despite the free goodies, Green Lights has not been without problems. For one, many companies have found that the rates of return on their investments have been lower than the 30 percent predicted by the EPA. More significantly, some companies are beginning to discover that participation in Green Lights can bring the unwanted award of subjection to federal hazardous-waste laws and potentially eve Superfund liability. This has soured some on the program. As the Tennessee Valley Authority commented to the EPA, "Regulating lamps as hazardous-waste adds significantly to the cost of relamping, which increases the payback period and could delay or eliminate relamping at some facilities."
Of course, many may wonder what makes fluorescent lights hazardous. After all, it is not as if energy efficient lighting is placing homeowners at risk. Indeed, the average homeowner is not subject to federal hazardous-waste regulations. For most consumers, replacing light bulbs is not a big deal-when a bulb burns out, it gets replaced. Many large companies on the other hand, tend to replace many bulbs at a time. Some even replace bulbs in bulk at specified intervals (a process known as a group relamping), particularly when conducting lighting upgrades. Corporate facilities including factories, warehouses, and office buildings will generate hundreds, if not thousands of used bulbs over the course of a year. This is where the federal rules come in.
Fluorescent lights contain small amounts of mercury-approximately 23 milligrams in the average four-foot tube, even fewer in newer models. It is this trace amount of mercury that causes fluorescents to meet the federal definition of hazardous waste set forth in the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). Under RCRA, generators of hazardous waste-in this case, companies disposing of enough light bulbs-must comply with a laundry list of regulations covering the accumulation, storage, transportation, and disposal of the bulbs, and the reporting thereof. Some small generators, those who produce only a little "hazardous waste," are conditionally exempt.
RCRA rules impose tremendous costs on firms seeking to convert their lighting. Indiana University spent $25,000 in one year disposing of fluorescent bulbs as hazardous waste. For one company, transportation and disposal costs for used bulbs increased more than fivefold due to the hazardous designation. Indeed, even the U.S. Postal Service, not known for its attentiveness to cost, has found the costs imposed by RCRA to be unwieldy. The Postal Service told the EPA, "The costs of hazardous waste disposal may make many relamping projects cost prohibitive." In other words, RCRA may be Green Lights' greatest enemy.
Despite all the cost, there seems to be little environmental benefit. In fact, RCRA rules may be doing more harm than good by increasing the net amount of mercury released into the environment. Coal-burning utilities are believed to be among the greatest anthropogenic sources of mercury emissions. Therefore, all other things being equal, reducing energy consumption would reduce mercury emissions. The EPA estimates that full implementation of Green Lights would reduce annual mercury emissions by approximately 10 tons. No more than four tons of air-borne mercury emissions are released by improperly handled or discarded fluorescent bulbs. If the EPA is concerned about mercury, reducing power plant emissions makes more sense than regulating fluorescent bulbs.
The EPA is well aware of the negative environmental impact of treating mercury-containing light bulbs as hazardous waste. For two years the agency knowledged that the costs imposed by RCRA and the threat of Superfund liability for bulb disposal looming in the background, provided powerful incentive against further participation in the Green Lights program, yet the EPA did next to nothing about it. Then in July 1994, the EPA proposed two potential revisions to RCRA regulations to facilitate the use and disposal of fluorescents.
The first proposal would provide fluorescent bulbs with "conditional exemption" from the relevant RCRA rules. This would significantly reduce the regulatory burdens associated with fluorescent lamp disposal and reduce regulatory compliance costs by an estimated $93 million. The second proposal would apply the EPA's "universal waste rule" to fluorescent bulbs. This modest proposal would marginally streamline the applicable regulatory requirements without changing any of the underlying disposal and treatment requirements. The sayings from this measure would be minimal, as would its effect on the demand for fluorescent lighting. Despite clear evidence that the regulation of lamp disposal was counterproductive, the EPA received comments against the conditional exclusion from environmental activists and some hazardous-waste treatment companies that see fluorescent lamp recycling as a potentially profitable business opportunity. Some even proposed that the EPA only loosen the rules if the lamps are destined for recycling facilities-presumably owned by company flies opposing the proposed conditional exclusion. The Environmental Technology Council, a trade association of hazardous-waste treatment companies, even maintains that its members would suffer "economic and competitive harm" should the EPA modify the RCRA rules.
Interestingly enough, the EPA proposal to conditionally exclude fluorescents from hazardous-waste disposal rules is also opposed by agency officials in the Great Lakes region, where bioaccumulation of mercury in fish is a real concern. "It is our belief that any emissions of mercury are significant and should be addressed," declared Region Five administrator Valdas Adamkus in a 1993 memorandum to the EPA's office of solid waste. According to Adamkus, even though "the increase in energy efficiency of the 'green' lamps results in lower mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. . . . Industries' concerns about fluorescent lamp disposal being a barrier to participation in Green Lights should not be an impetus for our policy on fluorescent lamp management."
Even if fluorescent bulbs were indiscriminately disposed of in unlined landfills, it is not clear that this would pose much of an environmental risk. To begin with, fluorescent lamps contribute less than 4 percent of the mercury present in municipal solid waste. In addition, the primary environmental concern regarding mercury has been that deposits from airborne missions bioaccumulate in fish and subsequently pose a risk to human consumers. This is why even industry representatives oppose incineration of mercury-containing lamps. There is no basis for attributing mercury contamination in the environment to land disposal of fluorescent bulbs.
For the past 50 years, the Eastman Kodak Company has maintained a landfill at its Kodak Park facility in Rochester, New York. Until 1991 fluorescent lamps were routinely disposed of in the landfill. In that single year, Kodak estimates that 124,000 four-foot lamps were disposed of at the site. Since that time, Kodak has engaged in extensive groundwater monitoring of the site but has not detected any mercury contamination from the landfill. Kodak reported to the EPA, "Despite the known presence of a large number of mercury-containing lamps in the landfill, none of the mercury determinations in this extensive data set exceed the New York state groundwater standards or the federal maximum contaminant level (MCL) for mercury in drinking water (0.002 mg/l)." Where mercury was found at all, it was found at background levels. This supports the conclusion of an earlier EPA study: the presence of fluorescent bulbs in municipal solid waste is unlikely to result in mercury contamination of groundwater, particularly since modern landfills have multiple linings that further reduce the likelihood of groundwater contamination. Not only do the current regulations increase airborne emissions of mercury, they do little, if anything, to reduce the contamination of groundwater.
Despite the level of interest in the EPA's proposal, no subsequent action has been taken, nor is one expected anytime soon. Some states have sought to loosen the disposal requirements for fluorescents on their own, but absent some action by the EPA, these modifications are probably illegal. Indeed, the conditional exclusion itself might go beyond the EPA's authority under RCRA, which is just one more reason why the law should be changed.
It is farcical that rules promulgated in the name of environmental protection actually stand in the way of environmental improvement. Yet that is what RCRA's regulation of fluorescent lamps does. RCRA, like most federal environmental statutes, embodies a drift-net approach to environmental protection. It is based on the underlying assumption that only a broad, all-encompassing federal regulatory structure is capable of ensuring the proper level of environmental protection. There is little consideration of the myriad unintended consequences of the regulatory net that has snared industrial users of fluorescent bulbs. Excluding fluorescent bulbs from RCRA's hazardous-waste regulations would produce modest environmental gains by removing a regulatory barrier to the adoption of energy efficient lighting. More importantly, it would signify that regulators in Washington, D.C. recognize that their rules can do more harm than good.
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