Shining with toxic light (4)

A map to the problem
The Ministry of Finance and the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) issued a notice in December 2007, which said subsidies would be offered to residents, companies and organizations that purchased energy-efficient bulbs.

The subsidy halved the energy-efficient bulb's price for individual consumers, and a discount of 30 percent was given to companies and organizations that bought in bulk via a tendering process.

Shortly after these measures, the NDRC listed the bulb as an item containing dangerous waste in 2008.

The central government then ruled that imports and sales of 100-watt-and-higher incandescent light bulbs would be banned as of October 1, 2012, as part of a national plan to save electricity and ban all incandescent bulbs of 15 watts or above from October 2016.

"The power used for illumination accounts for 13 percent of the country's total electricity consumption," a manager of ghg-manage.com, a website on carbon reduction, told the China Economic Herald, adding that if all 1.4 billion incandescent bulbs used now are replaced with energy-efficient ones, the country could save 48 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, or a reduction of 480 million tons of carbon dioxide.