“The energy-saving light bulb ends up as hazardous waste, too much insulation promotes mold and household drains are emitting a putrid odor because everyone is saving water. Many of Germany’s efforts to protect the environment are a chronic failure, but that’s unlikely to change.”
Alexander Neubacher writes in Der Spiegel:
… Because of the mercury, throwing broken energy-saving light bulbs into the ordinary trash is of course prohibited. A waste disposal company from Nuremberg in southern Germany has invented a machine that carefully cuts apart each light bulb and sucks out the fluorescent material and mercury. The mixture is then packed into airtight bags and filled into blue, 300-kilogram barrels. The barrels are loaded onto a truck and taken to a former salt mine in the Harz Mountains of central Germany. Thus, the energy-saving light bulb ends up in an underground waste depot, where it will remain forever as contaminated waste…
It seems Germans have taken it upon themselves to become martyrs for the cause of environmental degradation, and are suffering for it greatly… The whole article is a huge whine fest about how all of Germany is suffering under the weight of their own green – extremism. Sounds like a high school science project gone amuck.
NOtice how nothing is ever done or bothered with in moderation, it’s all or nothing… Also, there are no ‘bottom up” solutions, such as “community gardens” (only “buy organic”). As I read the criticism I think of practical, and basically FREE solutions for nearly every one of these “complaints” as I read them…
Have Germans lost their “edge” when it comes to innovation and engineering? And why are her citizens seeming like guinea pigs for industrial solutions? The regulations that are enforced from above onto people are going to be huge let downs… Are people really so helpless and hapless in the face of environmental challenges? Simple solutions at home seem quite salient and realistic. Why rely on “industry” to solve their problems? Wasn’t it Einstein who said that the thing that causes the problem is unlikely to be the source of its solution, or some such pap?
Why can’t they recycle the mercury?