Posted on 07/09/2007 1:59:45 PM PDT by Canticle_of_Deborah
“They contain mercury. Hard to imagine a more toxic substance. You are supposed to clear the room if you ever break one.”
You forgot to mention that you’re technically supposed to also call for an EPA clean up crew. And yes I’m totally serious.
There is no coating on the outside. Just glass. Your headaches may be due to flicker that you cannot consciously see.
The hum is bad too.
More silly alarmism, hye and nonsense.
One of those 4 foot long tubes has about 23 micrograms of mercury in it. It takes more than a million of the 4 ft. tubes to make an ounce of mercury.
A screw in replacement bulb has about 5 micrograms. So you would have to break about five million of them to release an ounce of mercury.
Is mercury dangerous? Yes, a bit.
Is it as dangerous as they say?
NO.
I probably ingested, inhaled and absorbed an ounce of it during my days as an ‘alchemist’.... And I’m only slightly retarded mentally and not deformed or physically ill because of it.
Cool. I put them in the garbage can and then toss bricks in there. “Fire in the hole.” BOOM!
And neither do CFL’s. Since Florescents only account for 4% of US Mercury emissions, or 0.2% of global mercury emissions.
Interesting posting history.
3 and a bit pages since Oct/03?
Just saying.
Flourescent bulbs have always contained Mercury. Every year 800 MILLION bulbs of the old variety are replaced, each of which has 20mg of mercury (the CFL’s max out at about 5mg).
We should have been recycling the old tubes, but a lot of people just break them for the fun of it. The new small bulbs are less likely to break by accident, and have less mercury than the old big bulbs.
They should be recycled. So should all your old batteries.
I eat a lot of fish. Maybe that’s why I glow when you plug me into an outlet.
Maybe people should start mailing them all to Al Gore’s home.
Oh god not another trash can with a different color to hide and drag out to the curb
Well you are Brillant duh
Aren’t LED lights supposed to replace these and regular lights in the near future anyway?
Thank you for your figures and wisdom.
One got broken at our house a couple of months ago. Maybe we should evacuate D.C.
That is MICRO grams (one Millionth of a gram.) Not mg- milligrams; that is a thousand times higher than what is really in a fluorescent tube.
What you meant was “mcg” or “µg”
CFL’s potentialy have less mercury emission total over their lifetime than incandescents.
http://www.nema.org/lamprecycle/epafactsheet-cfl.pdf
Check out the link to NEMA (National Electrical Manufacturers Assoc.) 6.4mg for CFL vs 10mg for incandescent.
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