The "Environmentalists Trash the Environment" theme is one I return to occasionally here at BH, and there's a splendid example in the latest edition of Der Spiegel. It concerns CFL lightbulbs, which are something of a personal bugbear simply because of their uselessness. But here's a new angle on the hypocrisy of CFLs.
Because of the mercury, throwing broken energy-saving light bulbs into the ordinary trash is of course prohibited. A waste disposal company from Nuremberg in southern Germany has invented a machine that carefully cuts apart each light bulb and sucks out the fluorescent material and mercury. The mixture is then packed into airtight bags and filled into blue, 300-kilogram barrels. The barrels are loaded onto a truck and taken to a former salt mine in the Harz Mountains of central Germany. Thus, the energy-saving light bulb ends up in an underground waste depot, where it will remain forever as contaminated waste.
It's not just lightbulbs though. Read the whole thing.
(H/T Alan, by email)