How 'bout a Ballast Bounty

How ’bout a Ballast Bounty?

As this issue’s feature article points out, some fluorescent lighting equipment can pose a significant risk to both human health and the environment. Lamps contain mercury, one of our most toxic metals. More significantly, as many as half of the ballasts in use in the U.S.—those made before 1979—contain highly toxic PCBs. And we’re not talking about a trivial quantity of PCB here; each of these pre-1979 ballasts contains more than a half-ounce (14 g) of 90%-pure PCB. To put that into perspective, the PCB in a single fluorescent ballast could contaminate 9 million gallons of water (28 acre-feet—34,000 m³), based on the EPA drinking water standards for PCB contamination.

Taxpayers are already paying billions of dollars per year to clean up PCB contamination at abandoned industrial sites, wetlands, and landfills. Approximately a quarter of Superfund sites are contaminated with PCBs. And more PCB contamination is likely to keep showing up, particularly in municipal landfills, as older equipment (including fluorescent ballasts) rusts away and releases the liquid PCB into the surrounding soil and groundwater.

What’s to be done? We can continue to pay vast amounts of money to clean up PCB contamination, or we can invest more money in keeping PCBs

out of the environment. Why not institute a federal bounty on PCB-containing ballasts? A bounty of $1 per ballast, with convenient drop-off locations at every municipal landfill in the country and a strong public education campaign, would dramatically reduce uncontrolled landfilling and illegal dumping. Ballasts do not comprise the largest source of PCBs in existence, but they are one of the more difficult sources to regulate, because the waste generators are commercial building owners, small businesses, and homeowners.

Sure, a ballast bounty program, including proper recycling of ballasts and thermal destruction of the PCB-containing capacitors, would take a lot of money—probably several billion dollars total over a period of years—but it could be a tremendously attractive investment for taxpayers. It might be an even better investment for the ballast manufacturers and users, who may otherwise be held liable for the enormous clean-up costs. What’s that old adage about an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure?

– Alex Wilson