Revisiting Fresh2 CFLs: Light Your Life and Clean the Air Too
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 03. 7.07
We were so excited to read about Fresh2 bulbs- two favourite TreeHugger subjects, CFLs and Titanium Dioxide, rolled into one. Then we did the obligatory search of the archives and Domenic had posted on them way back in February, 2005, when they still did posts with a slate and chisel. We thought it worth repeating because in those two years CFL's have gone mainstream and Titanium Oxide is finding its way into everything from concrete to floor tiles. Putting it onto light bulbs makes so much sense; it is a "photocatalytic reaction when exposed to the fluorescent light. This reaction releases electrons, or negatively charged particles. At the same time, a positively charged hole is formed in its place. This combination of negative and positive creates a very strong oxidizer called the hydroxide radical. Odors that come into contact with the positively charged holes are broken down by these oxidizers into odorless compounds." It is a wonderful idea and the testing shows it to be effective, and we wonder why they have not caught on. Can it just be that they are ten bucks each? ::Fresh2
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Googling titanium oxide mining turns up some interesting information. I'm leery of believing anything that's stripmined as an environmental good. And would you want your family to have to breathe the stuff for a living?
Titanium dioxide produces free radicals when exposed to ultraviolet light. Assuming the TiO2 coating is on the outside of the visible portion of the glass bulb, doesn't this mean that the light is putting out a significant amount of UV? Not the best thing for organic materials, including your skin/eyes. Does anyone have more information on this?
These may not be effective in a house. Looking at the testing overview, they have left out the control test, so we don't see what how the odor causing substances might decay in the presence of a standard CFL, but even assuming the effect is 100% from their titanium dioxide coating there is a problem.
The test chamber is loaded with 30ppm of ammonia, this is something in the range of 2-5 times the threshold for detecting it with your nose. It probably smells like you have just cleaned your kitchen counter with a cleaner that contains ammonia. In 10 minutes the bulb manages to breakdown 88% of the ammonia bringing it well under nose detectable threshold. The catch is that the test chamber is only 5 liters. My not large kitchen is 30,000 liters (cubic meters times 1000). Even granting some big bonuses to the bulb because the absorbtion* curve is clearly non-linear and we can operate at the most efficient part of the curve, we are still looking at hundreds of hours to breakdown* the ammonia from wiping the kitchen counter.
I'd be more impressed with tests that released various odors into a room and then had people come in and try to detect and identify them after a period of illumination with a control to compare against. As it is, I suspect these bulbs have a whiff of technology about them but no real utility in a house.
*The asterisks on "absorb" and "breakdown" are because the bulbs do no absorb odor, they break it down. Somewhere a marketing department didn't like the accurate word and replaced it with safe, familiar word. That does not inspire confidence in the summary of a technical paper.
I like the idea of making a room smell better and using less electricity. Is the reaction in a fresh2 bulb unique to their bulbs, or would other CFLs, in theory, offer this same "reduce pet smells" benefit?