Filament light bulbs — at least the 100W flavour — have been banned. The only question that needs to be asked is, what took the government so long?
Anyone who has ever tried generating their own electricity will know that these bulbs are stupidly wasteful. A 100W bulb kicks out some 95W of heat. It’s surprising really, what with the distinction that has to be drawn between (for example) strawberry flavour, strawberry flavoured and strawberry lest the consumer be unaware how little fruit the product contains, that they’re even allowed to call them “light” bulbs at all! Heat bulb would be a much more accurate description!
Every person who has bought a 100 watt filament bulb to use for general illumination instead of a 20 watt compact fluorescent bulb is needlessly pissing 80 joules of energy up the wall every second the thing is on, using up fossil fuels that won’t ever be available again. Add up all those 80s and you could probably take a whole coal- or gas-fired power station out of service.
Of course, the 20 watt fluorescent is still putting out 15 watts of heat, so there’s room for improvement, and there does need to be a recycling scheme set up — but since compact fluorescent lamps contain enough valuable materials to be well worth recycling if you can get enough of them together, this is pretty much inevitable.
I’m looking forward to seeing the next generation of LED-based lamps.
