We can't recognize programs that keep us healthy without bringing our attention back to the Macomb County Health Department. This extremely large and very comprehensive department exists to protect and uphold both the physical and environmental health of each and every one of us.

The health department has long been recognized for their efforts to develop and implement a number of programs that protect our environment. This is absolutely critical, especially because the county contains a complex system of waterways and river sheds that affect the health of the entire great lakes.

Keeping hazardous materials out of the landfills is then, a very important function. And for years, the county has make it possible for residents to properly dispose of old chemicals, paints and other noxious materials that simply don't belong in the ground untreated. And, just as soon as they get one substance covered, another substance is found to be especially poisonous to the environment.

Does anyone here remember the day when your science teacher would pour a spoon of mercury into your cupped hand? Remember squishing the big bead into lots of little beads and then rolling it back into one big bead again. It was like some kind of "hands-on" way for us to experience the properties of an element.

Today if that happened - there'd be HAZMAT on the scene! Can you imagine? Something that many of us freely handled in our youth now can't even be found in a thermometer in the drug store anymore!

Turns out mercury is especially nasty and is found in places you might not normally expect. Like some of the lights above our head. That's right, fluorescent bulbs contain enough mercury to be a concern to us. Tossing these into a landfill makes it that much more possible for mercury to seep into our atmosphere and cause some pretty serious problems.

And so it is no surprise that the health department came up with yet another way for citizens to be proactively involved in protecting the environment. They created a program that makes it possible for fluorescent tubes to be collected, the mercury extracted, and then safely disposed of.
To entice homeowners to participate, they partnered up with local stores to offer a free, low-mercury tube in exchange for burned out bulbs. The response was great - in the first year nearly sixteen hundred (1,600) bulbs were kept out of the landfills and hundreds of homeowners learned the right thing to do when their bulbs flickered for the last time.