Lights out for ordinary bulbs made in the U.S.

The last major U.S. factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs will soon be closing. When it does, the remaining 200 workers at the Winchester, Va., plant, about 70 miles west of Washington, D.C., will lose their jobs, marking a small, sad exit for a product that began with Thomas Alva Edison's innovations in the 1870s.

Workers at a factory in Zhengjiang, China, are making compact fluorescent light bulbs on an assembly line at Technical Consumer Products. The factory is one of the major exporters of CFLs to the United States.

Qilai Shen

An assembly line worker tests a CFL at the Technical Consumer Products factory in Zhengjiang, China. About a quarter of the bulbs sold in the United States are CFLs, according to NEMA, an industry association.

Qilai Shen

A factory employee in China works with fire to shape the CFL's glass casing. Although first developed by American engineers in the '70s, none of the major brands produce this type of bulb in the United States.

Qilai Shen

CFLs, which consist of glass tubes twisted into a spiral, require a great deal of hand labor and are now made almost exclusively overseas, mostly in China.

Qilai Shen

Workers in China are producing CFLs. U.S. factory employees working to create less-efficient incandescent bulbs became vulnerable as consumers begin to favor CFLs, a shift propelled in part by energy standards approved by Congress in 2007.

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A worker inspects CFLs in China. U.S. federal standards essentially ban the sale of most traditional incandescent bulbs by 2014, and it is expected to achieve enormous reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

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A worker wears gear to protect her eyes. As the lighting industry demonstrates, even when the U.S. government pushes an industry toward environmental innovation, the manufacturing of that next generation technology can still end up overseas.

Qilai Shen

A CFL assembly line in China. In a standard incandescent bulb, the filament is electrified until it glows and only about 10 percent of the electricity is transformed into light because most of it goes into heat. A typical CFL uses about 75 percent less electricity to produce the same amount of light.

Qilai Shen

CFLs are cheaper to make in China. Manufacturing in the United States would add 10 percent or more to the cost, but retailers have indicated that there is a demand for products made in the United States. "Retailers tell me people ask for 'Made in the USA,' " said Ellis Yan, who owns several factories in China that produce CFLs. "I tell them the product will cost 45 to 50 cents more. They say people will pay for it."

Qilai Shen

General Electric employee Pat Doyle adjusts his motorcycle helmet as he leaves a lighting production plant in Winchester, Va. The factory is set to close soon. The closure is in some ways another episode in the decades-long decline of U.S. manufacturing employment: It is cheaper to make light bulbs elsewhere, and GE will continue to make them in Mexico and China.

Richard A. Lipski-For The Washington Post

Doyle will be unemployed when the plant where he's worked for 26 years is closed for good. "We've been sold out," Doyle, 54, said. "First, sold out by the government. Then sold out by GE. Everybody's jumping on the green bandwagon."

Richard A. Lipski-For The Washington Post

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Lights out for ordinary bulbs made in the U.S.

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