Red Echo

March 17, 2010

Toshiba stops manufacturing incandescent light bulbs

After 120 years, Toshiba will stop producing incandescent light bulbs, switching instead to LEDs and compact-fluorescents.

5 Comments

  1. They can have my incandescent bulbs when they pry them from my cold, dead hands.

    Comment by Sara — March 18, 2010 @ 2:10 pm

  2. ~sniffles sadly~

    Comment by Your strange sort-of-in-law — March 19, 2010 @ 2:05 am

  3. More commentage on this, from my husband:

    I’m not entirely (by which I mean “not at all”) convinced that
    mini-fluoro and LED lights really are better for the environment than
    incandescent bulbs, even if you interpret “better for the environment”
    extremely narrowly as “amount of CO2 released” and nothing else.

    Incandescent bulbs have a little bit of metal and a little bit of glass
    and a little bit of ceramic, and not very much else. Not even air :)

    Mini-fluoro lights have just as much metal and glass and ceramic, plus
    plastics, plus mercury, plus a great wacking big lump of complex
    electronics with diodes and transistors and chips made of exotic (and
    usually toxic) materials like gallium and arsenic. I’d really like to
    see a cradle-to-grave accounting of how much CO2 they produce, and not
    just pretend that they fall from the sky already made, free of any
    environmental costs.

    Regardless of which way the sums fall, I guarantee that the politicians
    have made their decision based *purely* on the running costs, without
    looking at the manufacture costs. And given that the big lightbulb
    manufacturers themselves have been behind the push, odds are high that
    it’s more about them making more profit than protecting the earth.

    Comment by Your strange sort-of-in-law — March 19, 2010 @ 4:57 pm

  4. I don’t like compact fluorescents either. They are, as you describe, too complex, too full of exotic materials, too fragile, too expensive to produce, to be a true replacement for incandescents: but the real reason I don’t like them is simply that the color of the light is wrong, and they don’t look good. They’ve gotten better over the years, but their engineers have yet to fully overcome the greenish cast.

    LEDs, I contend, are another matter: an LED is a slip of silicon with a couple of wires attached, baked into an epoxy housing. They are cheap, efficient, durable, and have been undergoing a steady, decades-long, exponential increase in maximum brightness. They are available in a wide variety of colors, including a multi-frequency “warm white” which is a pretty solid replacement for incandescent light. They run cool and last practically forever. Our civilization is already fully committed to silicon-based semiconductors; I think we can switch to LEDs for lighting with little additional impact.

    Comment by Mars Saxman — March 19, 2010 @ 5:19 pm

  5. I don’t know if you can get Philips Tornado/mini Tornado bulbs out there, but I find their ‘warm white’ comes closest to the golden tone-warmth of incandescents. I held out against fluorescents for a long time, but those Philips ones won me over – we use them for almost all of our home lighting now, and I don’t get the horror-headaches that I do from traditional fluorescent stuff (e.g. at the office, eww).

    Down here the only LED stuff I’ve yet seen remains Star Wars Cantina blue-white. We keep a number of those little battery-driven LED lights (the kind that attach to walls/doors with intrinsic stucky backing) around, for peering into cupboards late at night and for use during power outages…one of which we had three nights ago. Using a combination of LED lights, battery-driven candle lanterns, and live candles made for a lovely relaxing supper :-)

    Comment by Your strange sort-of-in-law — March 21, 2010 @ 12:46 am