Researchers have developed a cloth that can absorb mercury from broken florescent bulbs.
I’ve been wondering about the florescent bulb mercury danger issue recently. The old-fashioned long tube florescents contain mercury also don’t they? I have rarely, if ever, heard anyone worrying about the mercury in those. I remember when someone broke a couple of long florescent tubes in the place where I used to work and it was no big deal. They just swept up the glass and that was it.
June 30th, 2008 - 9:56 am
Yes, they do. I have a big stack of burnt-out grow-light bulbs from my “backwoods” version of a growth chamber. No one wants to touch them and I am told I can’t just put them in the trash, so there they sit.
I remember in college, some of my friends and I got hold of a bunch of burnt out fluorescent tubes and had a rather jolly afternoon smashing them up. (We didn’t know about the mercury).
Oh well, at least I didn’t do any other brain-cell-killing activities in college, so I probably didn’t do major damage.
(My father says when he was a kid, he remembers people playing with beads of mercury…I think the concern is a fairly recent thing)
June 30th, 2008 - 9:09 pm
I used to have a little hand-held plastic maze with a blob of mercury in it, much like this one:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2005-03/000488.html
I think the concern with the bulbs is that the mercury is a vapor which can be inhaled.