Ireland will be the first country to move to energy-saving lightbulbs, but will consumers embrace the change, asks Paul Cullen
'Ban the Bulb!" It mightn't have the heady ambition of an earlier catch-cry of the environmental movement to "Ban the Bomb", but, unlike the campaign against nuclear weapons, the ban on traditional lightbulbs is about to become a reality.
In little over a year, the Republic will become the first country in the world to ban the incandescent lightbulb. Green Minister for the Environment John Gormley's bid to emulate the success of the plastic bag tax and assure his place in political posterity means householders, firms and public bodies will have to fit long-life, low-energy bulbs as their lights start to pop after January 2009.
Introducing his carbon budget earlier this month, Gormley dismissed the traditional bulbs invented by Thomas Edison as "technology invented during the age of the steam engine". (The bicycle on which the minister arrived is, equally, a product of the age of steam but presumably not for the chop.) The ban on the sale of incandescent bulbs is a bold step ahead of the rest of the world which is, admittedly, moving in the same direction. But is it a premature one? Proponents of compact fluorescent lighting (CFLs) make extravagant claims for the new technology, yet consumer resistance remains strong and the doubters are muttering more loudly than ever.
The argument is favour of CFLs is based on their lower energy consumption, longer life and cheaper running costs. They last "up to" 15 times longer than traditional bulbs and consume one-fifth of the energy. Switching to CFLs will cut Ireland's carbon emission by 700,000 tons and save consumers about €185 million in electricity costs, it is claimed.
The first CFLs were big, clunky models that took some time to warm up and wouldn't fit under many lampshades, but Jim Keogh of the Electro-Technical Council of Ireland says these deficiencies have been overcome and modern CFLs are just as compact as traditional bulbs. Keogh says the delay problem has been resolved and CFLs are now available to meet the colour requirements of a variety of uses; because they are cooler, they are also safer. "People will realise that they are in a win-win situation because they are paying less for their energy."
HIS CONFIDENCE ISN'T shared by electrician Paul Duffy, who spurns CFLs for most uses because the light they give is "crap". "It's just very dim; you don't get the same punch, the same colour. You wouldn't be doing your cooking by them." Duffy points out that CFLs, by and large, can't be used with dimming switches. "A few years ago, I put in 180 downlighters in a job I did on a house in Dalkey; is the owner going to have to take out all of those fittings?" He also believes the new bulbs will be ill-suited to security applications as their lifetime will be severely diminished by being constantly knocked on and off. For the same reason, CFLs up to now tend to be used mostly in areas where lights are left on continuously or for long periods, such as landings.
Brian Flanagan of the Association of Electrical Contractors also believes CFL technology "isn't there yet" and consumers will be hard to convince. "We're a small bit ahead of ourselves," he says.
In spite of the official claims, bulb life is a frequent cause of complaint with many users. "I really want to believe in CFL bulbs but I've had three or four of these blow on me at home after very little service," comments one householder. "CFLs are like fillings; supposed to last a lifetime, and then they're gone and needing expensive replacement far sooner than you expect," says another.
The quality of light emitted by CFLs is another bugbear mentioned by contributors to online debates about the ban. "I'm sitting here at my laptop in the living room with an 11-watt bulb burning away in the background. It's been on for the last hour," says one CFL user. "I may as well be sitting in the back garden looking at a star for all the light coming out of it."
The problem seems to arise from the huge gap in quality between the best CFLs on the market and inferior alternatives. Good bulbs have a fast warm-up time, no flicker and, for key areas of use, a high colour rendering index (CRI), which is a measure of how well the colour of objects appears under illumination.
Flanagan insists the problems with delay and colour quality haven't been sorted out yet, and the higher prices of CFLs means many contractors will keep costs down by importing traditional bulbs from the North if the Republic does a solo run on a bulb ban.
Ironically, for a supposedly environmentally-friendly product, CFLs pose significant challenges on disposal. Traditional bulbs can be dumped in the bin or even have their glass recycled at the end of their natural life, but CFLs contain mercury and must be disposed of carefully and unbroken. Most likely, this will involve bringing them to recycling facilities or back to the shop where they were bought.
WHERE A CFL is broken, the advice is to open your windows, never use a vacuum cleaner or broom to clean up and to scoop the content using a piece of cardboard into a sturdy plastic bag. Then place this bag into a second bag and seal it before disposal . . . got all that? This, presumably, is why CFLs are subject to a PRF (Producer Recycling Fund) of 50 cent when no such recycling levy applies to traditional bulbs.
Keogh remains convinced that the transition to CFLs in 2009 will be painless, and that further improvements in technology will see the development of low-energy lights that can be dimmed. "The market will see to it that the price comes down once volumes increase after the ban is introduced." Perhaps, but in a country that last month saw the cancellation of operations in Kerry general hospital in a dispute over who had responsibility to change the lightbulbs, the transition to CFLs may yet turn out to be anything but easy.