Of course, mercury is not produced by elves in a magic tree - its part of the environment to begin with, and the amount of mercury used by man is pretty analogous to the amount of CO2 used by man.
But why get in the way of a manufactured crisis.
Another hyped up HOAX, SCAM. The amount of Mercury is minuscule. All of a sudden people are concerned about mercury in light bulbs. Where have you been concerning all the millions of fluorescent tubes discarded into the environment for the past 60 years? Why aren't we all dead already?
“An average fluorescent tube contains as much as 40mg of mercury.”
“How much mercury is contained in a CFL?
Each bulb contains an average of 5 milligrams of mercury,....”
“Sales of “fluorescent lumiline lamps” commenced in 1938 when four different sizes of tubes were put on the market....”
“...... By 1951 more light was produced in the United States by fluorescent lamps than by incandescent lamps.....”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescent_lamp#History
“By using less electricity, CFLs help reduce mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants, which are the largest source of human-caused mercury emissions in the United States,” said agency press officer Ernest Jones. (Related: “Clean Coal? New Technology Buries Greenhouse Emissions” [May 2, 2006].)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/05/070518-cfls-bulbs_2.html
The devil is in the details. Jump off the anti CFL bandwagon and save money & energy while putting less mercury into the environment.
P.S. You should still be able to purchase incandescent bulbs if you want to waste money & energy and put MORE mercury into the environment.
And here I thought all this time mercury only came from fish.