I opened my closet door the other evening after work and was instantly freaked out.
What littered the floor of the closet looked like bits of shredded paper that my dog had chewed up. Unfortunately, it was far more threatening and the clean-up was much more complicated than I had expected. The bits of thin white scraps were actually broken pieces of a compact fluorescent light bulb that had fallen off of a shelf and shattered all over the closet floor. Normally, with a broken light bulb, some sweeping up and perhaps a final vacuuming is all that's required. Not so with a CFL, because as I'm sure all of you already know, the bulbs we're all supposed to be screwing into our sockets to save energy and the planet contain the highly toxic mercury. So what's a freaked-out person to do?
I went onto the web and googled "broken CFL bulb" and learned that there are some very strict government guidelines for cleaning up and disposing of the residue from these broken bulbs. For starters, you are not allowed to vacuum up the mess, as it could send mercury vapors into the air. Same goes for sweeping. You'll contaminate the broom. Never mind mopping it up, either. And if it gets on your clothing, you can't put it in the washing machine for the same reasons. Mercury, like the planet, gets around. So if you too suffer from this broken bulb syndrome, here's what the government says you need to do. And by the way, I think I'm switching to candles. (Click for further instruction. You can also learn more about going green in your own home by clicking here)
Before Clean-up: Air Out the Room
Have people and pets leave the room, and don't let anyone walk through the breakage area on their way out.
Open a window and leave the room for 15 minutes or more.
Shut off the central forced-air heating/air conditioning system, if you have one.
Clean-Up Steps for Hard Surfaces
Carefully scoop up glass fragments and powder using stiff paper or cardboard and place them in a glass jar with metal lid (such as a canning jar) or in a sealed plastic bag.
Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small glass pieces and powder.
Wipe the area clean with damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes. Place towels in the glass jar or plastic bag.
Do not use a vacuum or broom to clean up the broken bulb on hard surfaces.
Clean-up Steps for Carpeting or Rug
Carefully pick up glass fragments and place them in a glass jar with metal lid (such as a canning jar) or in a sealed plastic bag.
Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small glass fragments and powder.
If vacuuming is needed after all visible materials are removed, vacuum the area where the bulb was broken.
Remove the vacuum bag (or empty and wipe the canister), and put the bag or vacuum debris in a sealed plastic bag.
Clean-up Steps for Clothing, Bedding, etc.
If clothing or bedding materials come in direct contact with broken glass or mercury-containing powder from inside the bulb that may stick to the fabric, the clothing or bedding should be thrown away. Do not wash such clothing or bedding because mercury fragments in the clothing may contaminate the machine and/or pollute sewage.
You can, however, wash clothing or other materials that have been exposed to the mercury vapor from a broken CFL, such as the clothing you are wearing when you cleaned up the broken CFL, as long as that clothing has not come into direct contact with the materials from the broken bulb.
If shoes come into direct contact with broken glass or mercury-containing powder from the bulb, wipe them off with damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes. Place the towels or wipes in a glass jar or plastic bag for disposal.
Disposal of Clean-up Materials
Immediately place all clean-up materials outdoors in a trash container or protected area for the next normal trash pickup.
Wash your hands after disposing of the jars or plastic bags containing clean-up materials.
Check with your local or state government about disposal requirements in your specific area. Some states do not allow such trash disposal. Instead, they require that broken and unbroken mercury-containing bulbs be taken to a local recycling center.
Future Cleaning of Carpeting or Rug: Air Out the Room During and After Vacuuming
The next several times you vacuum, shut off the central forced-air heating/air conditioning system and open a window before vacuuming.
Keep the central heating/air conditioning system shut off and the window open for at least 15 minutes after vacuuming is completed.
I'd be more worried about the sushi you ate last week than this.
If you're that terrified by the smidgen of mercury in a CFL, you'd better avoid breathing air in large parts of the US ( lots of mercury spewed out by coal power plants) and stop eating fish. For that matter, there are so many other toxic substances both naturally and artificially in our environmet, you'd better find a different, safer planet to live on.
Be fearful of CFLs ... another absurd message from the oil industry.
If you spill mercury, do ventilate, do get people (especially sensitive receptors such as children, the elderly, and pregnant women) out of the building, and then call the fire department and your homeowners insurance agent. If you rent, call your landlord. Some homeowners policies cover mercury remediation (less your deductible) caused by accidents such as broken bulbs or thermometers. If you are unsure if yours does, calling your insurance agent to find out or reading your policy is a good idea.
Yes, but the amount in fluorescent lights is minuscule - it's such a low concentration that, while you should re-cycle fluorescent lights, a broken bulb won't kill or injure you in any way that anyone can detect.
The federal regulations for cleaning up broken fluorescents was promulgated to protect workers who have to deal with broken fluorescent tubes as part of their work. If you're a warehouse worker having to deal with damaged cases of fluorescent tubes on a regular basis, the mercury could mount up over the course of years.
If you don't have that kind of exposure, don't worry about an occasional broken CFL in your vicinity, it won't have a detectable impact on your health.
1- NEVER vacuum, for any reason, a mercury spill. Mercury is an element and household vacuums cannot stop mercury vapor and droplets from being spread to a substantially larger area. Imagine a water balloon. Intact, the water is contained. Hit it with a bat and the water sprays everywhere. The same happens to a mercury droplet when entering a vacuum. I remember one site my former company worked at where the homeowner vacuumed the spill and contaminated her entire first floor. Mercury remediation crews use vacuums, but they have special High Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filters that can trap mercury.
2- A 15-minute ventilation will not suffice to ventilate all mercury vapors. Professional mercury crews sometimes have to let a house with a spill ventilate overnight. I remember one site where we had to let the house ventilate for three days with fans in the windows, space heaters heaters blowing on the hot spots, and the house sealed for positive pressure.
3- Do not wipe the area. That will spread the mercury contamination.
4- In reality, you should NEVER try to clean a mercury spill yourself. Every case we worked on where the person attempted to remediate the spill themselves resulted in no less than a tripling of the professionals' remediation efforts once we were called in.
A broken CFL is not a significant mercury spill, no matter what the supporters of old-fashioned incandescent bulbs would like you to think.
Who benefits from spreading scare stories about fluorescent tubes? Where are the investigative journalists looking into the sources of these over-the-top attempts to make us give up CFLs?
Fluorescents have been around for decades - where are the studies backing up these claims that they are deadly?
I agree that a whole lot of people are not going to bother to clean up their CFL's this way. Who has the time? I really hope that this word spreads around so that people can turn them in in a responsible way and not too many get tossed in landfills. I have to wonder about the safety of the people who work at dumps and recycling stations.
I wonder what kind of lights they use at the White House.
Great stuff. Never got infected tissue because... ...it killed the tissue along with the bacteria!
It's also a proven fact that %99.999 of the people who ate pickles before the Great Depression subsequently died. Over a billion people who have eaten pickles since then have also died. Most living pickle eaters are currently in remission, but are expected to die within the next 70 years.
Clearly, pickles are a fatal health hazard - they would be banned if it weren't for the powerful Pickle Lobby. If you have already eaten pickles, it's too late, you will die - it's only a matter of time.
http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/promotions/change_light/downloads/Fact_Sheet_Mercury.pdf
Also http://www.homepower.com/article/?file=HP120_pg12_ATE_1 . those moaning about govt control, envIro hooey and the right to drive your hummer lemming like over a cliff there's a lovely melting glacier waiting for you where a very pissed off polar bear will consider you for lunch Back to cfl’s If you break one clean it up. You won't die either way. contains mercury the size of the dot on this "i". 4 millionths of a gram in a cfl. a mercury thermometer has 500 mg‘s. don’t break it when you have the flu .5 mg’s in tuna fish, eat 8 sandwiches you just ate a cfl . killer tuna? 28 bulbs in average american house ? replaced with cfl eliminates need for ( 60 ) - 1500 megawatt power plants . recycle your bulb ? take it to lowes, home depot or ikea. , Europes number one brand are unbreakable. cfl's are now available dimmable, your cfl doesn’t last long ? check the warranty & take 'em back to the store or buy a better brand.. But heck what do I know? I managed to save enough energy in my career to power 50,000 homes.. made $120,000 08 Happy earth day..we're running out of time bgreen
Obviously, this is not someone who has ever taken a light bulb apart. OK, let's do that... virtually. At the center is a filament, made of tungsten. The Material Safety Data Sheet pretty much says this is inert, especially in the case of wire, as found in a light bulb. The bulb is, not surprisingly, glass, most often with a powdered diffusion material inside - powdered glass. Modern bulbs are not a vacuum, but usually contain a chemically neutral gas, such as nitrogen, which is about 90% of the air.
The support wires holding the filament are nickle, again not generally hazardous, unless you are in a nickle smelter (http://www.clean.cise.columbia.edu/msds/nickel.pdf). The screw-in base is aluminum and the leads are soldered with a lead-tin solder... Hey, we finally hit lead! But far less lead-tin solder there than in the computer you are typing on right now. The base button is brass, and the base insulator, often black and about 6mm thick (0.25"), is usually made of vitrite, which does have some lead in it, but, like a Waterford crystal wine glass, does not leach lead out of the glass. I couldn't even find an MSDS for vitrite. Basically colored glass.
Could incandescent bulbs be made greener? Sure... But panic-stricken claims that they have a lead base are, in a word, baseless.
By the way, note that the health warning given in that MSDS for tungsten is less of a warning than for beach sand: http://www.sciencelab.com/xMSDS-Sand-9924861