Light Bulb Ban.

But don't the new L.E.D. lamps contain more electronic stuff, all eventually  destined for landfill?


It is one of the problems - electronics can be cheap, but it is not good for the environment, either when it gets buried at the end of life or in the disruption and energy expended to get the materials to make the components, even secondary  things like the volumes of water contaminated each day to run a chip foundry are not trivial, though in that case it can be re-processed (though the places that do cheap electronics tend to be less good at this and dump to the sea, though that too is improving.).

Nature knows how to convert broken glass back into sand and filament wires back into the oxide, and will do so over time. It's track record with plastics and the contents of electrolytic capacitors is less satisfactory.

Partly it is about economic lifetime, and the sheer volume to be thrown away - something like the Dubai lamp - engineered to run cold and be more or less the last lamp you ever  buy would be the most sensible alternative to the filament lamp.

But it does not keep the lamp makers in business, so the ones you can buy here run the electronics warm or even quite hot, and so they fail after a life time comparable to the filaments they replace, so tons of the things end up being buried.

Of course the green argument works best if all your electricity comes from fossil fuels, and/or is in short supply. If neither of these is true, then the balance swings back to filaments.

Mike.

PS edit

That temperature of the LED thing is really important, far more so than any other sort of lamp

from the Dubai lamp datasheet 

But don't the new L.E.D. lamps contain more electronic stuff, all eventually  destined for landfill?


It is one of the problems - electronics can be cheap, but it is not good for the environment, either when it gets buried at the end of life or in the disruption and energy expended to get the materials to make the components, even secondary  things like the volumes of water contaminated each day to run a chip foundry are not trivial, though in that case it can be re-processed (though the places that do cheap electronics tend to be less good at this and dump to the sea, though that too is improving.).

Nature knows how to convert broken glass back into sand and filament wires back into the oxide, and will do so over time. It's track record with plastics and the contents of electrolytic capacitors is less satisfactory.

Partly it is about economic lifetime, and the sheer volume to be thrown away - something like the Dubai lamp - engineered to run cold and be more or less the last lamp you ever  buy would be the most sensible alternative to the filament lamp.

But it does not keep the lamp makers in business, so the ones you can buy here run the electronics warm or even quite hot, and so they fail after a life time comparable to the filaments they replace, so tons of the things end up being buried.

Of course the green argument works best if all your electricity comes from fossil fuels, and/or is in short supply. If neither of these is true, then the balance swings back to filaments.

Mike.

PS edit

That temperature of the LED thing is really important, far more so than any other sort of lamp

from the Dubai lamp datasheet