A big deal has been made lately about mercury in CFL bulbs, and that if you break one you have to follow a special procedure to clean it up.
But does the same hold true for the big tube shaped bulbs they use in office buildings? The reason I ask is because back in high school, when I worked for a cleaning service, we would just fling them into the trash compactor. Sometimes for fun we would shatter them against one another (I believe there was a scene in “40 Year Old Virgin” where the guys were doing this, but I may be thinking of another movie). We certainly had no directive to recycle them or handle them in any special way - just throw them out with the regular trash. And us lowly workers didn’t have any clue about how poisonous they may or may not have been. Mainly we were just concerned about not getting cut by shards of glass.
Yes it is true. Those bulbs contain mercury. The procedure described to clean them up is a bit overkill, but when it comes to hazardous materials industry has to cover their butts. I think the only time you would want to evacuate the premises, is if the bulb was hot when it was broken. I would be concerned about bulbs broken on the carpet.
Personally, I hate to give the people objecting to CFL’s credit for much, since usually they are global warming deniers that never made a stink about the bulbs in the office. On the other hand, I think they have a point, and I wonder if enforcing their use is really a good idea. New technologies are on their way, and contaminating homes with mercury is not easily reversible. Also, these bulbs aren’t good for places where the lights are only on for short periods of time like in bathrooms and closets.
Mercury free fluorescent bulbs are available. They use xenon as the excitation gas. They are not as efficient as mercury CFL’s. I personally will use these bulbs in the kitchen where food exposure is a possibility. Commercially available LED’s are pathetic. We may have to entirely redesign lighting strategies. Rather than expecting a small bulb to provide enough light for a room, we could use long strips of LED’s, or even entire ceillings that light up. According to my wife, some very good LED’s are being made in the lab, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
The amount of mercury in a typical CFL is miniscule - around 4 mg. Unless you are breaking bulbs on a daily basis, you have nothing to worry about. There is still a small concern that they shouldn’t be treated as garbage, since landfilling many thousands of them might create a harmful concentration of Mercury.
If one were to injest 4 mg of mercury, I would be very concerned about mercury poisoning. I know that if you break one of these bulbs you are not likely to injest that much mercury. Like I said, the prescribed clean-up is overkill. Nevertheless, it is a cumulative poison. If you break it on your carpet, I don’t think you will be able to get it all up. Then, as I do, if you have an infant crawling around on that carpet, I would be concerned about potential development issues.
It also seems that we are risking a severe environmental backlash as conservatives trot out the real problem of mercury and “expose” environmental hipocracy. They’ll say “Environmentalists are putting our childeren at risk! How cruel could they be?”. Of course these same people probably objected to the push against mercury thermometers, and regulation of environmental mercury from coal emmisions. Add in that these bulbs generally suck for many uses. They are constantly burning out in my basement where, I’m only down there for a minute at a time so they are constantly being switched on and off. They take a few minutes to get to full light, so I get to use the bathroom in romantically dimmed lighting. I think enforcing regulations to use these bulbs will result in an environmental backlash.
I’m not a toxicologist, but I suspect that ingesting 4mg of mercury would have little effect. Metallic mercury is poorly absorbed by the body. As far as your trouble with CFLs go, I haven’t experienced this (although I used to have an old high-wattage one that took a while to come up to full brightness). Essentially all the screw-in bulbs in our house have been replaced with CFLs for years now.
I don’t know anything about mercury but I contacted the manufacturer (GE) about CFLs burning out prematurely in some places I had installed them and they aren’t recommended for applications where they will be switched on for short periods of time. The lifespan of the lamp in those cases will be no better than incandescent.
ETA: cite