[fanfan]

I seem to recall something from county recycling about CFLs -- while they'd prefer you turn in dead ones at the recycling centers, it's okay to put them in the trash.

Whoa! What?

Lets say you throw out one CFL , that's 4mg. of mercury, crushed in the back of a garbage truck that drops it's load at a local landfill.

Let's say that you have one thousand neighbours who do the same thing. Now we have 4000mg, or 400g, or 40kg (is my math right?4 kg?) of mercury going into your landfill.Which leaches into the water table, and over a few years what have you got?

Glow in the dark children, that's what you've got.

[sionnsar]

Whoa! What?
Lets say you throw out one CFL , that's 4mg. of mercury, crushed in the back of a garbage truck that drops it's load at a local landfill.
Let's say that you have one thousand neighbours who do the same thing. Now we have 4000mg, or 400g, or 40kg (is my math right?4 kg?) of mercury going into your landfill.Which leaches into the water table, and over a few years what have you got?
Glow in the dark children, that's what you've got.

ROTFLOL!!!!!!!

First off, the math is off. 4 mg/CFL x 1000 CFLs = 4 grams. You're now somewhere in the vicinity (sez memory) of one mercury thermometer, which we've been using since the dawn of time, um, the discovery of fire, um, the invention of tools, um, the bronze age, um, the iron age, um, the invention of the bagpipe, um, the discovery of that funny stuff good for plugging wind-holes, um, well, a long time ago, anyway.

And last I looked, my kids weren't glowing in the dark. (Kind of a shame, actually, because it would've made keeping track of them a lot easier at night.)