The cost effectiveness of compact fluorescent light bulbs goes down considerably if one must take into account inevitable (in our house) breakages and collateral damage. It will take a lot of energy savings to pay for the new sofa slipcover now that we’ve discarded the not-so-old mercury-laden one.
I was thinking that my husband would probably find cleanup instructions somewhere that were less paranoid than EPA’s guidelines. Unfortunately, he came back from his online search saying, “I hate it when the paranoid site is the most convincing.”
Of course, we both have memories of playing with the mercury globules from broken thermometers when we were kids. That could mean “hey, no problem with mercury, we turned out fine!” or that we should be extra careful having already absorbed a lifetime supply of the stuff.
February 23, 2009 at 11:50 pm
I’m pretty relaxed about low-intensity doses.
BUT, there was one EPA site point that did convince me – you do need to watch out for kids getting whole globules in their mouths. Our kid explores mouth first, pretty much. AND I was worried about washing really doing a thorough job, especially on something multilayer; I’ve certainly seen plenty of stains stick around…. The floor was even worse, unsealed wood, because we’ve both seen glass come out of cracks after breakage for weeks, saw no reason this’d be differet, so we cleaned the cracks. She had a better idea than the EPA duct tape suggestion – toothpicks, which are tons more thorough AND faster if you do a postsweep.
February 24, 2009 at 9:35 am
The mercury dust in the light bulbs is far more dangerous than the liquid mercury found in thermometers. The liquid mercury’s molecules are too large to be absorbed by the body – either through the skin or through the mucosa of the digestive tract. Even if you have a cut.
The dust, however, can be inhaled (the real danger) and enter the bloodstream via contact in the lungs. Mercury causes neurological damage, among other damage to other systems.
Those bulbs scare the crap out of me (after the research I did). I don’t know why they don’t alert people to the very real dangers, “they” just kind of blow it off and tell people it’s no big deal, but you know – be careful. 1 energy saving light bulb can irreversibly pollute 5000 gallons of water (should the bulbs wind up in a landfill instead of being recycled like fluorescent light bulbs need to be). Do those packages tell you that the bulbs need to be recycled at places that accept them, and not thrown away?
After I found this out, no more “energy saving” light bulbs for me. Makes you wonder why they push them so hard.
Hang in there!