I was chatting with some of my work friends about the question of mercury in compact fluorescents. Low-mercury compact fluorescents have about 4mg of mercury per bulb. That’s why people are encouraged to recycle them, since then the mercury can be recaptured, rather than going into the landfill. At the moment, it isn’t actually illegal to throw out compact bulbs, but if you do, it can release mercury vapour into the air when they are compacted by the garbage truck or at the landfill.
In any case, all of this has led to a bunch of research on compact fluorescents, and other sources of mercury. With respect to the breakage situation, it turns out that you can get plastic coated compact fluorescent bulbs that keep things a bit more contained (thanks to this article for the tip). And here’s a low key (and slightly propaganda-ish) EPA fact sheet that describes how to deal with the situation if you break a compact fluorescent bulb in your home (I encourage you to read it if you are using compact fluorescents). Or- if you want to get really hard core, you can read this page which goes into great detail, and covers how to handle breakages of all types of home fluorescents, not just the compact ones.
And just for completeness, here’s a page that tells you how to deal with mercury spills of various other sizes (more relevant for mercury thermometers, but I thought it was interesting. I hope no one I know is still using a mercury thermometer).
For general mercury information,
here’s the USA EPA page on
mercury, which discusses mercury, and various sources for it. Of
course, there’s the fish containing mercury problem, and it turns out
power plants spew quite a bit of mercury into the air, too. Here’s a page
from the Agency for Toxic Substancs and disease registery with a bunch of
PDFs on mercury. They do provide some information on the toxicity of
things like mercury vapour. For comparison purposes only (insert typical
warning about me being a non-expert and these are only very rough
ballpark figures here, and do more research before making action decisions), a compact
fluorescent bulb containing 4 mg of mercury that broke in a room about the
size of our kitchen (say
3.5 * 4 * 4 meters) could result in a maximum vapour level of 70
micrograms/meter
cubed or 0.07grams/meters cubed (once it had dissipated into the room).
This
document from the U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational safety and
health administration says: “OSHA PEL The current Occupational Safety and
Health Administration (OSHA) permissible exposure limit (PEL) for mercury
vapor is 0.1 milligram per cubic meter (mg/m(3)) of air as a ceiling
limit. A worker’s exposure to mercury vapor shall at no time exceed this
ceiling level.” Presumably this does not include pregnant women or children. And presumably that’s why that one site above says that you should close off the room and open the windows to air it out before you do the clean up.
posted at 12:58 on Sun, 21 Jan, 2007 |
path: /living
All material copyrighted by Jen Schellinck. All rights reserved.