POISON FILL: LED bulbs appear poised to displace compact fluorescents as the king of the hill of green bulbs, but a study published in late 2010 in Environmental Science and Technology found that LEDs contain lead, arsenic and a dozen other potentially dangerous substances.
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Dear EarthTalk: Are there health or environmental concerns with LED lightbulbs, which may soon replace compact fluorescents as the green-friendly light bulb of choice?—Mari-Louise, via e-mail
Indeed, LED (light emitting diode) lighting does seem to be the wave of the future right now, given the mercury content and light quality issues with the current king-of-the-hill of green bulbs, the compact fluorescent (CFL). LEDs use significantly less energy than even CFLs, and do not contain mercury. And they are becoming economically competitive with CFLs at the point of purchase while yielding superior quality lighting and energy bill savings down the line.
But LEDs do have a dark side. A study published in late 2010 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology found that LEDs contain lead, arsenic and a dozen other potentially dangerous substances. LEDs are touted as the next generation of lighting,” says Oladele Ogunseitan, one of the researchers behind the study and chair of the University of California (UC)-Irvine’s Department of Population Health & Disease Prevention. “But as we try to find better products that do not deplete energy resources or contribute to global warming, we have to be vigilant [about] toxicity hazards….”
Ogunseitan and other UC-Irvine researchers tested several types of LEDs, including those used as Christmas lights, traffic lights, car headlights and brake lights. What did they find? Some of the worst offenders were low-intensity red LEDs, which were found to contain up to eight times the amount of lead, a known neurotoxin, allowed by California state law and which, according to researchers, “exhibit significant cancer and noncancer potentials due to the high content of arsenic and lead.” Meanwhile, white LEDs contain the least lead, but still harbor large amounts of nickel, another heavy metal that causes allergic reactions in as many as one in five of us upon exposure. And the copper found in some LEDs can pose an environmental threat if it accumulates in rivers and lakes where it can poison aquatic life.
Ogunseitan adds that while breaking open a single LED and breathing in its fumes wouldn’t likely cause cancer, our bodies hardly need more toxic substances floating around, as the combined effects could be a disease trigger. If any LEDs break at home, Ogunseitan recommends sweeping them up while wearing gloves and a mask, and disposing of the debris — and even the broom — as hazardous waste. Furthermore, crews dispatched to clean up car crashes or broken traffic lights (LEDs are used extensively for automotive and traffic lighting) should wear protective clothing and handle material as hazardous waste. LEDs are currently not considered toxic by law and can be disposed of in regular landfills.
According to Ogunseitan, LED makers could easily reduce the concentrations of heavy metals in their products or even redesign them with truly safer materials, especially if state or federal regulators required them to do so. “Every day we don’t have a law that says you cannot replace an unsafe product with another unsafe product, we’re putting people’s lives at risk,” he concludes. “And it’s a preventable risk.”
Of course, we all need some kind of lighting in our lives and, despite their flaws, LEDs may still be the best choice regarding light quality, energy use and environmental footprint. That said, researchers are busy at work on even newer lighting technologies that could render even today’s green choices obsolete.
CONTACT: UC-Irvine study, www.pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es101052q?prevSearch=irvine%2Bled.
EarthTalk® is written and edited by Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss and is a registered trademark of E - The Environmental Magazine (www.emagazine.com). Send questions to: earthtalk@emagazine.com. Subscribe: www.emagazine.com/subscribe. Free Trial Issue: www.emagazine.com/trial.
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38 Comments
Add Commentthis report seems absurd when one takes in the fact that, by comparison a cfl or standard incandescent bulb has all its contaminants explosively aerate when said bulbs fail, are broken from drops etc. or are simply roughly handled to the point of breaking. This EASILY allows people and locations to be contaminted. By contrast, i have gone through hundreds, nearly a thousand led's in my personal experience and even when one fails they don't explode spraying chemicals everywhere. in addition their manufacture uses only a couple percent the quantity of toxins as are present in other bulb technologies. this article strikes me as sensationalism without merit.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGo back and do some proper research on it... post your numbers, get cross reasearch going.
"Throw away the broom." That does sound crazy, but if you look closely at our manufactured environment, it sounds a bit more sober. Of course, you shouldn't use a broom to sweep up toxics, you should use a wet paper towel.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe mention of copper underscores the point that replacing one consumption with a better is replacing an evil with a lesser evil. I can't imagine any electric light that uses no copper, unless it uses aluminum as a conduit, which has its own hangups.
When I see all the lead that comes with any and every object that contains any metal and is made in China, I wonder at the seeming necessity to include it in so many processes. If we would just make things like lights here in the US, there'd be no lead in the things. But a company making toxic equivalents in China would always undersell, so consumers are individually smart misers but collectively idiotic self-poisoners.
My thoughts exactly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"breaking open a single LED and breathing in its fumes" What fumes are you talking about? Are not LEDs solid state?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, bern1005, my first thought reading this was - it's not 1st April,is it?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA silly article. Everything contains trace amounts of nasty stuff. There was no mention of Lumens,life expectancy of the product or relative amounts of the nasty bits. I can't think of anything that uses power that does not have copper.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA dead person cannot buy product, but a sick, or handicapped person must buy more products than a healthy one. This is a more effective approach to influencing business. Intelligently labeled products do not prove more marketable, and so that expense is forgone, along with all the others that necessarily accompany it. This is what is known as a "happy coincidence". This kind of "happy coincidence" is the frontier of modern business law, not just the discovery of them, but their construction as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAny meaningful law can be circumvented by a "happy coincidence" as long as it is judiciously applied and the end result is inflation and toxins. Toxins, though, are expensive to clean up. Guess what? Another "happy coincidence".
If some of the items tested contain 8x the amount allowed by California law, then where are the law enforcers here banning the products and fining the distributors? Let's get the enforcement right which will in turn get the laws right.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm quite sure that Dr. Ogunseitan has broken open LEDs before and knows that they are solid chunks of metal and plastic. The writer of the EarthTalk article apparently has not. (But oddly enough, this article doesn't seem to be an excuse to cite a paid advertiser, like all other EarthTalk articles I've seen.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDr. Ogunseitan's lab simulates a worst-case scenario, where the products are ground to a powder to simulate careless waste handling, soaked in acid to simulate acid rain, and tumbled to simulate the passage of many years.
According to the (2010) cited paper, the LEDs can be made to leach levels of metals into the water that California has regulated. Red LEDs can be made to leach federally regulated levels of lead, but none of the other LEDs he tested qualified as a hazardous material under federal law. (I assume the circuit boards' solder can leach far more lead than the LEDs themselves.)
As for cleaning up broken lights, something funny is going on with the article. The original 2011 press release (written by a university publicist) has no direct quotes and mentions a "special broom". Another article says the "special broom" was the researcher's words and fails to note that the situation described is regulated only by California law. And somewhere along the way "even the broom" was added. I blame the editors as much as the writers.
http://www.uci.edu/features/2011/02/feature_led_110228.html
LED lightbulbs and LEDs should be nontoxic to consumers who don't chew on them or burn them. However Dr. Ogunseitan raises an important concern in his research on cell phones- many products end up in poor countries for recycling, where there are NOT properly-lined landfills or environmental and workplace safety regulations. We need to consider recycling when building a new product.
Why can't products be approved before the are mass produced? China makes most of the parts that fail before they should. Why let the products into the US in the first place.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAll the above comments very good, although none mentioned that the common household white LED light contains the least amount of lead - but does contain nickel, which some people are allergic to. Not to dismiss any concerns about toxicity in especially household products, but some of the coins in my pocket contain significant amount of nickel - is it too late to put a mask on now?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat we can be sure of is the zealot like march to "saving the environment" from CO2 and global warming will likely result in a host of technologies, such as CFLs or LEDS, bad ideas, like carb sequestering or the more insane concept of engineering the atmosphere and loads of regulations to control everything and all of this will probably result in far worse environmental hazards and damage than if we just left things as they are.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEvidence for this is everywhere such as in medicine where some miracle drug is produced and 15 other drugs to counter act all the side effects of the miracle drug and the others taken resulting in a human petri dish of chemicals.
Landfills full of CFL used mercury, this host of metals in LEDs and who knows what else will yield ridiculous ideas to somehow spray those landfills in the name of containing the new superfund site of totally mercury and metal poisoned land seeping into some aquifer. And of course even more toxic and ridiculous light bulbs and who knows what else will be invented to replace the previous miracle light source. The entire time the planet will have grown to 20 billion people negating the effect of any sort of global warming reduction from these bulbs leading to CO2 sequestering.
With the carbon sequestering insanity, after we bury all that atmospheric oxygen in the ground with the carbon, there will be calls to do something about the now reduced oxygen levels, probably resulting in something crazy like releasing massive amounts of oxygen from ocean water, which will saturate the atmosphere with hydrogen, which eventually dissipates into space, truly for the first time reducing the actual water supply of the planet because the hydrogen will be gone. As that hydrogen dissipates into space it will take more heat with it causing global freezing and that will prompt the same environmental wackos to start demanding we burn forests to cause global warming again. This will result in too much warming leading to the engineered atmosphere idea of releasing reflective metal powder of some kind into the air to again cause more freezing and at the end we will be taxed to exhale and taxed for the oxygen tank we need because all of the above insanity and the resulting failed engineered atmosphere will be too toxic for us to breathe.
Sure my butterfly effect caused by CFL and LEDs sounds crazy but if you really look at the history of humans and their inability to just not do bad ideas, this could easily happen. It is not really that far out of the realm of possible consequences.
Dr Mercola recommends broken cell chlorella supplements to help eliminate what we are exposed to.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@bops
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisProducts mass-produced in China are approved -- by the Chinese government. It's just that Chinese safety regulations are sometimes less stringent than US ones, just as US regulations are sometimes less stringent than California ones.
As for reliability, that's a bit off-topic. I wouldn't be surprised if China makes most of our lightbulbs that fail early AND most of our lightbulbs that last longer than expected. If you would like to say otherwise, do provide a journal citation.
@priddseren
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTake a breath there. We need to distinguish between people who know what they're talking about and make modest claims (like Dr. Ogunseitan), those who are well-meaning but not entirely informed (the university PR writer), and those who describe an alternate universe and incite panic to sell magazines (Earth Talk).
@alan6302
I was wondering where the advertising angle came in. "Dear EarthTalk" usually has one.
@jtdwyer
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; only the dose permits something not to be poisonous." -- Paracelsus
All risks are not equal. It's important that news articles say not, "X causes cancer" but "X predicts 1 case of cancer per 100,000 people, while Y predicts 10 cases."
I wonder just how much lead is in one LED? They seem to like talking about how much in terms of regulatory limits, but what about a real number in, say, milligrams? LEDs are mostly plastic, and the emitter itself is tiny. And where did the LEDs come from? When were they made? Most generic components theses days are European RoHS compliant and that severely restricts toxic content, specifically the lead content. Finally, I suggest that before anyone gets too worked up about this, try to break open an LED. Throw it against the wall. Jump up and down on it. If you hit it with a hammer, it will probably break, but that's about it. Otherwise, the emitter is sealed inside of plastic and aren't we all worried about the fact that plastic lasts forever?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScientific American is not USA Today, and needs to add analysis to its reporting rather than merely dumbly repeating what someone else says. It's silly to parrot the truism that gallium arsenide LEDs contain arsenic, as it is to unquestioningly repeat a statement that one in five people are allergic to a metal, nickel, which has been common in US coinage for more than a century. Proportion and means of exposure are critical; A LED contains milligrams of its toxic components, while a lead-acid battery contains kilograms. Heck, with the right dosage and means of administration, both water and oxygen are quickly fatal.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe total environmental cost is what's critical here, not the content of a specific device measured without context. Look at the cycle cost of an incandescent light bulb versus a LED source of equal brightness: total energy consumed during product life and its consequences (atmospheric mercury from coal, and CO2 from hydrocarbon fuels, as two specific metrics), the total cost of materials in one LED vs. in the tungsten/glass/copper bulb it replaces, etc.
If the quoted conclusions are truly the results of the work being done, then Dr. Ogunseitan's operation, while well-meaning, approaches uselessness by so completely divorcing its subjects from the context in which they are used, and approaches deception by claiming the results to be directly applicable to the real world. (My hope, actually, is that these results have been taken out of context - it's important work that does need to be done.)
Scientific American is not USA Today, and needs to add analysis to its reporting rather than merely dumbly repeating what someone else says. It's silly to parrot the truism that gallium arsenide LEDs contain arsenic, as it is to unquestioningly repeat a statement that one in five people are allergic to a metal, nickel, which has been common in US coinage for more than a century. Proportion and means of exposure are critical; A LED contains milligrams of its toxic components, while a lead-acid battery contains kilograms. Heck, with the right dosage and means of administration, both water and oxygen are quickly fatal.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe total environmental cost is what's critical here, not the content of a specific device measured without context. Look at the cycle cost of an incandescent light bulb versus a LED source of equal brightness: total energy consumed during product life and its consequences (atmospheric mercury from coal, and CO2 from hydrocarbon fuels, as two specific metrics), the total cost of materials in one LED vs. in the tungsten/glass/copper bulb it replaces, etc.
If the quoted conclusions are truly the results of the work being done, then Dr. Ogunseitan's operation, while well-meaning, approaches uselessness by so completely divorcing its subjects from the context in which they are used, and approaches deception by claiming the results to be directly applicable to the real world. (My hope, actually, is that these results have been taken out of context - it's important work that does need to be done.)
Apparently US businesses that wanted to skirt US clean air and water and health laws and still make profits for stockholders (completely their short-term fiduciary duty) moved manufacturing to China instead of updating metallurgical and micro-fabrication processes over the past 40 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo it's no surprise to find who lobbies for "free trade agreements." If you owned a shoe store, and wanted to barter a family's worth of quarterly shoes for a family's worth of weekly meals, you'd want to include in the contract the option to call it off if the food was poisonous. But that would make the cook wary about the contract, what you might in the future call poisonous, whether you might have a child allergic to peanuts, and the price of the food might go up as a hedge.
It seems most Americans need more strings of christmas lights, and more and more; so the one thing they don't want is prices to go up, as long as they can have longer and longer strings of christmas lights. They don't think "LEDs will allow me to have more light for less on the utility bill," more like "LEDs will allow me to have more lights on the same circuit." We truly are the fat pigs of the world. How much of an arse is a person who has no regrets, no apologies? Haven't you ever felt violent towards someone who never thinks they're wrong?
I'm feeling more ranty than constructive today. All apologies.
The reason why the government promoted fragile mercury bulb is because they are psychotic . Toxins have long been used as a weapon against sheeple.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLEDs contain "large amounts" of nickel and copper? Oh my! Oh... wait... in those little nearly weightless diodes? Your pocket, right this instant, may easily have 1000s of times more of these toxic materials!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisU.S. Nickel (5g) - 75% nickel, 25% copper
U.S. Dime (2.268g) and Quarter (5.67g) - 91.67% copper, 8.33% nickel
The article also states that they contain lead. SOME may contain lead, but many including those from leading manufacturers like CREE are lead-free.
Also, I wonder if Ogunseitan is aware that his home and office are webs of "toxic" copper. The average home contains nearly half a mile of the stuff! (2.3 feet per sq ft is typical)
This is definitely the silliest article I've ever read in SciAm. Should play nicely with the tin-foil hat conspiracy crowd though.
"Ogunseitan adds that while breaking open a single LED and breathing in its fumes wouldn’t likely cause cancer..... If any LEDs break at home, Ogunseitan recommends sweeping them up while wearing gloves and a mask, and disposing of the debris — and even the broom — as hazardous waste."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs this article a joke? LED's are tiny little blobs of plastic with a TINY amount of Gallium Arsenide Phosphide in solid form. They will not "break at home" unless you pound on one with a hammer, repeatedly, and will not produce "fumes" unless you vaporize one with a torch.
"According to Ogunseitan, LED makers could easily reduce the concentrations of heavy metals in their products"
"Easily" is a relative term. The electronics industry has struggled over the past decade to eliminate lead from solder in order to meet the European Union's Restrictions on Hazardous Substances (RoHS), but consumers will soon discover that lead free solder carries many drawbacks, including "tin whiskers" and embrittlment. Consumer products made from lead free solder will fail sooner, ending up in landfills or in small villages in third world countries for unregulated disassembly at a much faster rate than products made with leaded solder. That is why EU RoHS makes an exception and allows leaded solder in aeronautical and medical equipment which both require absolute reliability. Remember that when your LED television or digital SLR fails in a couple of years and you end up junking it and shelling out for a new one.
This article seems to over-emphasize the long-term risks of disposal, making LEDs sound like immediate hazards, which they are not. While I agree that the long-term risks ought to be minimized and the heavy metal content regulated with *any* large-scale manufacture, there are some health effects associated with LEDs that are largely being overlooked: lamp color and flicker.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLEDs come in a variety of color spectra, and can even be manipulated during operation in some cases (RGB devices). Some have good color rendering and these tend to be more expensive, while it is cheaper to manufacturer white LEDs with inferior phosphors. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since different applications encourage different price-performance trade-offs. However, there need to be better standards for evaluating the color rendering index (CRI) than the 50 year-old method we have in place. Since LED products often have narrow-band spectra, their CRI does not line up well with their actual performance in many cases. A better CRI standard, such as that proposed by Prof. Lorne Whitehead, should be adopted:
http://hangzhou2012.cie.co.at/sites/default/files/cie_2012_-_lorne_whitehead_-_improving_the_cie_colour_rendering_index_-_how_this_can_be_done_and_why_it_matters.pdf
Regarding flicker, there is no reason for an LED to have flicker other than minor cost savings on the electronics, and most LEDs have substantially worse flicker than comparable CFLs. This should be addressed sooner rather than later, and a number of researchers are looking at the problem, while the public seems generally unaware:
http://www.essex.ac.uk/psychology/overlays/2010-195.pdf
Before we start filling our homes and offices with inferior lighting, we need to get regulations in place to make sure that LEDs meet a minimum set of manufacturing, labeling, and toxicity standards. Since nearly everything is decided on price in this potentially huge market, regulation is essential to our well-being in the years to come.
Chicken and egg! How do you test the quality of a mass produced item before it's mass produced?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe ignoramus who wrote this multifaceted display of technical illiteracy ought to be fired.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAmong other things, interesting that no one seems to have taken into account the illegitimacy of some of what TigerWild said. TigerWild contends that "standard incandescent bulb" contaminants "explosively aerate when said bulbs fail, are broken from drops, etc. or are simply roughyl handled to the point of breaking". No incandescent bulb ever exploded when it failed, when the filament burned out! The bulb simply stops working! It does not explode! And there is no "explosion" when an incandescent bulb breaks. What TigerWild experiences and interpreted as "explosion" was the implosion when air entered. Incandescent bulbs are vaccums inside! That's how the filaments "burn" without burning up! And since they are vacuums, there can be no contaminants present in gaseous form to "aerate! Or many TigerWild thought they were referring to fluroescent bulbs, which do contain a gar, but also never exploded when they burned out!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso, a crucal point, and an crucial revelation. This may cause this to be removed, but LED lights are undesirable, too, and perhgaps more so than for any othe reason mentioned, because they are psychologically unappealing! They don't illuminate well, they don't illuminate fully, they are bright in a spot, but nowhere else. That can give rise to a subtle sense of unease, like darkness encroaching. And the fact that this is jot acknowledged, it can cause the more impressionable to think it's all their fault and question their own sanity. It is extremely interesting, too, and says a crucial amount about "science", that no "scientific" discourse about these new forms of lighting seems to address issues like this!
Give me tungsten light, or give me death!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this这事儿正常的很，就像老子曾经说的，“福兮祸所伏，祸兮福所倚”，没有神马事情是完美滴。
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEmpirical studies have long shown that electronic components use magic smoke to function, and as proof they cease working when this smoke is released.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis has got to be the most horrid piece of "environmental" reporting I've seen in years. To publish it under the banner of Scientific American is to demonstrate just how far the magazine has fallen.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe fact is, nearly all of the Pb in an LED bulb is tied up in glass. It's going nowhere. Same with the As. Now as for Cu, just what do the authors of this drivel expect to be used as a conductor?
Bottom line, we *do* need to stop landfilling electronics, and LED bulbs qualify as electronics.
I am reliably informed that this magic smoke is extremely toxic. Inhaling it will cause immediate death while growing enormous and unsightly warts. If you cause the smoke to be released by an LED, the only recourse is to leave the country and move to Greenland.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen I was a sixth-grader in 1959, I got a wonderful lead-smelting kit so I could make my own lead toy-soldiers and shoot them with my BB gun. All of us secretly looked forward to broken thermometers as an opportunity to "silver" a dime. Not to suggest that the days of burning rivers were the good old days--but somebody needs to get a grip here. From this article, you'd think that a single busted LED could wipe out a daycare center.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOmigod! Not ANOTHER killer out there! Now it's those LEDS who were supposed to save the world and make the climate stop changing. What will we do! What will we do!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWater is full of hydrogen and oxygen; dirt is full of, well, dirt; we need sun screen for the sun, the oceans and plants are full of carbon, and everything else is chemicals, chemicals and more chemicals.
I'll bet Obama can fix all this, you think?
Here in Britain I don't know what regulations cover LED lights, but there's good advice on disposing of electrical and electronic equipment at
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswww.direct.gov.uk/en/Environmentandgreenerliving/Wasteandrecycling/DG_069060.
I agree. The quantity of lead, arsenic, nickel, copper, etc that would come from LEDs would not be more than a minuscule fraction from other sources, e.g. automobile batteries. In any case, the comparison is with CFLs, and the overall assessment should be based on all plus and minus factors, like environmental hazards, energy saving, and ease of manufacture.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEverything has two sides,no exception of LED Lights http://www.ledlightshub.com/. Learn a lot. Thanks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishi poor science there is no way that a broke LED bulb has as much toxic material as a CFL, just in terms of Mercury vapor and phosphors alone. All far more toxic in terms bio avability the amount of circitary will be about the same for either bulb, LED are solid state, there fore no off gas, no shards no small bits
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCrazy unfounded and silly story.