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.
Oh god not another trash can with a different color to hide and drag out to the curb
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”
Confessions of a mercury-bulb spear chucker: When I was a kid, I discovered stacked behind a commercial building hundreds of burnt-out mercury bulbs, all 8 feet long. They made great javelins and made a wonderful popping sound when hurled against a wall.