Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

A few months back the Australian government passed legislation that requires a phase-out of old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs — the kind Thomas Edison invented — in favor of much more efficient compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs. These new bulbs use less energy as they burn, plus they last 10 times as long, so Australia as a whole could easily reduce its carbon dioxide by a billion tons because of this move.

Meanwhile, here in the States, Wal-Mart has been on a tear to get customers to switch from incandescents to CFLs. Once upon a time, the fluorescents were priced like a luxury item, but now they’re so cheap — and they save you so much money in the long run — that Wal-Mart can sell them as another “everyday low prices” item.

Now the world’s biggest retailer has gone one better by announcing that it will start a pilot program to collect used CFLs for recycling. (There’s a small amount of mercury in a CFL, so it shouldn’t go into the regular trash.)

On top of that, an even newer type of bulb promises to outdo CFLs by a mile. And that’s before we get into long-lasting LEDs . . .