If you’ve upgraded your home’s old-fashioned light bulbs to compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and light-emitting diode bulbs (LEDs), you already know you’re saving energy and money, reducing emissions from power plants, and minimizing waste. However, you may be discovering that you need to recycle these new light bulbs differently—you can’t just throw them in the trash. While CFLs can last up to seven years and LEDs as long as 23 years (learn more about choosing the right light for your life), you’ll eventually need to know how to dispose of them properly. Today, CFLs are in over 70 percent of U.S. homes. But because they contain a small amount of mercury, disposal can be a little tricky. CFLs are perfectly safe as long as they stay intact. However, if you toss them in the garbage, they’ll probably break before they even reach the landfill, immediately jeopardizing the health of waste management workers and eventually poisoning nearby land or water sources.

When your CFL’s time is up, it’s essential that you find an Environmental Protection Agency-approved CFL recycling site. If a CFL breaks in your home, follow these steps:Where To Buy Moroccan Furniture In Nyc You don’t have to worry about mercury with LEDs, but they do contain nickel, some lead, and even trace amounts of arsenic. Auto Repair Shop For Sale St LouisWhen used properly, these lights are risk-free, but they have significant health hazards when they’re left in a landfill.Deck For Hot Tub Support More than 95 percent of an LED bulb is recyclable; simply call your local waste management company to learn its policies for collecting and recycling. The recycling process will separate the glass from the other elements, all of which will eventually be recycled and reused.

Since CFLs and LEDs are so efficient (you can thank a 2007 law that went into effect earlier this year), you won’t really have to think about disposing of them very often. But you will think about the money you’re saving every time you open your electricity bill. Annie Josey is a blogger for Pegasus Lighting, a nationally recognized lighting retailer committed to helping every customer have a sustainable lighting experience—from first spark to last light.Light Bulbs Actually Spur Bright Ideas, Study Reveals Seeing light bulbs might foster bright ideas, scientists now find. The concept that reaching an insight is much like shining a light into a dark place goes back to at least Plato. It was this philosophical analogy that actually led social psychologist Michael Slepian at Tufts University to wonder if light bulbs might actually spur insights. "Insight has been studied for decades; it is still a The researchers first wanted to see if light bulbs actually

were unconsciously linked to enlightenment inIn a preliminary experiment, 73 college students watched as words were flashed across a computer screen. They viewed 10 words associated with insight — such as create, conceive, and envision —10 other words and 20They were then asked to respond as quickly and as accurately as possible if what they were shown was a word or non-word. The students had either a bare, unshaded incandescent 25-Watt light bulb or an overhead fluorescent light turned on in the room. Volunteers exposed to the light bulb responded quicker to words linked to insight than other words, supporting the notion that light bulbs were indeed To see if light bulbs could actually promote insights, Slepian and his colleagues next gave college students spatial, math and verbal problems to solve and had either a bare light bulb or an overhead fluorescent light turned on in the room partway into the problem. solved the problems faster or more often with the light bulb than with the

"Our environment can influence our creativity," For instance, in the experiments: Seventy-nine college students were given three minutes to solve a problem where they had to connect four dots arranged in a square by drawing three connected straight lines. They were not allowed to either lift the pencil from the page or retrace a line, and had to end the drawing at the same dot it began with. (This involves drawing a triangle.) to the light bulb solved the problem twice as often as ones given the fluorescent Thirty-eight college students were given sets of three words and told to come up with another word that could form a compound with allFor instance, a triad of words might consist of "print," "berry," and "bird," with the answer being, "blue." led volunteers to solve 70 percent more triads correctly. "What I find most surprising about these results is that something as elusive as the process of insight can be influenced by a

subtle feature of our environment," Slepian said. discussed insight as if it's something entirely internal to the person, that it's something that happens within you, and what we found in several studies is that something external to you can influence insight." In case the quality of the fluorescent light was somehow influencing these results, the scientists also repeated the word triad experiment with a bare, unshaded incandescent bulb and a shaded incandescentVolunteers performed better with the bare bulb than they did with the "Our findings are not a result of the level or type of lighting, but are a function of exposure to the symbol of insight, the light These findings suggest that it takes more than light toInstead, the researchers suggest our brains respond favorably to bare lightbulbs because they are familiar symbols of insight. kind of so-called "priming effect" has been seen before in psychology — for instance, when shown artifacts from the business world, such as