Mercury Contamination Vs. Energy-Efficient Lightbulbs

phyrebyrd writes "How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent lightbulb? About US$4.28 for the bulb and labor — unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about US$2,004.28, which doesn't include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health."

Comments

Steven Milloy

[Profane MuthaFucka]

He's the Junk Science guy, which means that you ought to take this entire article with a mountain of salt. Even with the mercury in the CFL, you're ahead of the game when you consider the energy savings. A lot of electricity is produced with coal, and that puts out more mercury than the CFL contains over the life of the bulb.

But there's a lesson here - if you break a CFL, open the windows and clean it up yourself. Don't lick the floor where it broke. Don't gnaw on the pieces of broken glass. Don't scrape the coating from the inside of the bulb, dissolve it in vodka, and inject it into your neck. Use common sense.

There's no need to call the government to help you clean up a broken lightbulb. This woman deserves what she gets, just for wasting people's time. The bureaucrats probably don't want to mess with her house either, but they are *doing what they are paid to do* and if they didn't take care of the reported problem, someone could accuse them of not doing their job.

Down the Rabbit Hole we go!

[OctoberSky]

Have you ever heard the term "Mad as a Hatter"? Maybe, but you probably do know who the Mad Hatter is.

Mad as a Hatter is a term that stems from "Hatters" (hat makers) using Mercury in the formation of hats. It was used in the process of removing hair from animal hides. All the hatters ultimately went insane or had the other symptons of mercury poisioning.

That's where the term comes from, and that's where the idea for the "Mad Hatter" came from for Alice in Wonderland. What does this have to do with the article? Nothing really, just trying to spread some random information.

U$ 2.000 is the environmental cleanup charge

[Acer500]

According to the article, after breaking the lightbulb in her daughter's bedroom, Mrs Bridges called Home Depot which directed her to Poison Control hotline which directed her to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, which sent a specialist.

The specialist found an unacceptable quantity of mercury (six times the "safe" level), and directed Mrs Bridges to a cleanup firm that gave the U$ 2.000 estimate (way high in my opinion, is it that hard to clean?).

Insurance, as usual, won't cover it (sounds reasonable this time).

An interesting point is that each CFL contains five milligrams of mercury, and Maine's "safety" standard is 300 nanograms per cubic meter.

By comparison, according to Wikipedia, "the typical "fever thermometer" contains between 0.5 to 3 g (.3 to 1.7 dr) of elemental mercury."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-in-glass_ther mometer

She could have saved some money by reading this:

"Cleaning Up Small Mercury Spills, For spills of less than two tablespoons:" by the government of Michigan
http://www.michigan.gov/deq/0,1607,7-135-3307_2969 3_4175-11751--,00.html

or this (PDF warning) http://www.newmoa.org/prevention/mercury/smallspil ls.pdf

Not every CFL has that much mercury:

http://www.lighting.philips.com/gl_en/news/press/s ustainability/archive_2006/reduction_in_mercury.ph p?main=global&parent=4390&id=gl_en_news&lang=en

Still, it's good to be warned and be aware about the potential environmental hazard.

Re:No, I buy nice ones.

[ZeeExSixAre]

I don't know if it was just me, but if you guys remember that scene in The 40-year-Old Virgin where they're breaking fluorescent tubes against each other's legs, then shouldn't all the actors in that scene be dead with how much mercury was floating around there?

Disposal?

[norminator]

We looked at buying some CFL bulbs the other day. My wife is a little paranoid about some things, including mercury, so she isn't too sure about using the CFL's. But I thought it's interesting how on the boxes they say that they contain mercury, and to dispose of them properly. How do you dispose of mercury properly? I once had a mercury thermometer that broke open and made a mess, so I called around to a few places, not wanting to just drop it in the trash. No one could tell me how to dispose of it. The best answer I got was to take it to my local waste transfer station where I left a bag of contaminated items, including carpet, with a pile of what looked like chemical cleaners and stuff. I think I even had to pay a small fee.

A few months later, my kids fried our microwave oven. Again, I tried to find out what the best way to dispose of a microwave is. Noone would give me a straight answer. I don't even know what exactly is in a microwave, but I'm sure there's some stuff that shouldn't be in the groundwater supply. I ended up tossing it in a dumpster, because I couldn't get any answers.

I think it's great that Wal-mart and others are pushing CFL's, but I wish there was more information available about how to get rid of old bulbs like this. And batteries. Global Warming is important, but I think that slowly poisoning our soil and water isn't a good thing, either. But the manufacturers wash their hands of it all by saying "Dispose of Properly". So how do I dispose of it?