Be aware of this guy. He is the devil himself. If you see him run fast as you can.
What is going on with everyone. I just read about a women who ended up paying upwards of $2,000 to clean up a compact fluorescent light that accidentally broke in her home.
This url works at the time of this writing.
http://ellsworthmaine.com/site/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7446&Itemid=31
Come on people! Are we really a nation full of idiots?
So you think I'm blowing smoke huh? I work in a laboratory that happens to perform Hg analysis in soil, in water, in your hair if you like. As mentioned in the header i am tired of all this hype. When the analysis is reported in terms of ng/kg (nano-gram per kilo-gram) the hype is pretty obvious. To translate that into numerical form: E-9/1,000. So for every 1,000 grams of sample there is probably 20ng of mercury.
In that case it will take 1,250,000 grams of sample to accumulate 25mg of mercury. That's 1.377 ton. To put that number into perspective consider a Mcdonalds salt packet. That little packet contains 189mg. So the next time you are at Mcdonalds grab a salt packet and divide it by 7.56. In terms of mass, that is how much mercury you would find in our example sample for very 1.377 ton. From this you can see that we are doing a fair job at controlling mercury in comparison to the days of which mercury thermostats were made(more on this in a bit). So now you can quite bitching about mercury.
You see that little guy up there that everyone is so afraid of, he has at most 25mG of Hg. We have already been through the correlation with this figure(that's actually the cited figure for a 4' bulb) But i will give all you pansies a strong number to play with.
Did you read that link? The state the women lives has placed safe limits on Hg exposure which are currently set to 300 ng/m3. Well, if she had broken the bulb that had 25mG of Hg and assuming she lived in a single car garage-sized home (70 m3) she would have a big problem on her hands. Her garage sized home would be 1250 times over the safe limit. I don't know this women but i suspect her home is a tad bigger than a single car sized garage. Of course this assumes that all the mercury present in the bulb was available in volatile form and had evaporated into the air(very unlikely). The reality is that most of the mercury is likely to be in solution with the CFL electrode or deposited on the surface of the electrode.
Terrible huh, just terrible. You think Hg is bad in new products do you? Lets go back a few years and look at the old school thermostat to control heating systems. I just so happen to have one of these thermostats laying in my lab ( i replaced it with a 7 day 4 event lazy American friendly programmable model). Anyway, i weighed the mercury switch and found 42.52 grams of raw beautiful mercury! What a find, huh? Well that single thermostat could make up for 1700 48" fluorescent tubes. OR 8,504 CFL (the type that she broke). That is, if you were to believe all this hype at face value.
How many homes still have a mercury based thermostat? I bet a-lot more than you or i think.
So the problem here is that people are afraid of mercury. Well it is a neurotoxin. But guess what, there are a-lot more neurotoxins than just mercury. Here are some that i have found
Agatoxin
Agitoxin
alpha-bungarotoxin
Anatoxin
Apamin
Atracotoxin
ATX II
Batrachotoxin
beta-bungarotoxin
Botulinum toxin
Brevetoxin
Calcicludine
Calciseptine
Capsaicin
Charybdotoxin
Ciguatoxin
Cobrotoxin
Conotoxin
Crotoxin
Dendrotoxin
Domoic acid
Erabutoxin
rErgtoxin-1
Fasciculin-I
Grammotoxin SIA
Gonyautoxin
Holocyclotoxin
Homobatrachotoxin
rHongotoxin-1
HWTX-I
Iberiotoxin
Joro spider toxin
Kaliotoxin
Kurtoxin
Latrotoxin
Maculotoxin
Margatoxin
Maurotoxin
Noxiustoxin
Palytoxin
Philanthotoxin
Phoneutriatoxin
Phrixotoxin
Pompilidotoxin
Robustotoxin
Saxitoxin
Scyllatoxin
SNX-482
Stichodactyla Toxin
rStromatoxin-1
Taicatoxin
Taipoxin
rTamapin
Tertiapin
Tetrodotoxin (TTX)
Textilotoxin
Tityustoxin-K
Versutoxin
Wow, what a list. I wonder, has anyone studied the increase of all these neurotoxins like they have Hg. I bet not. Of course all of these are not accumulative as mercury is. But i am willing to bet the sum total of these are far greater than mercury (in the average home). You see these toxins are insect related. You better be afraid, very afraid.
This reminds me of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Did you know a-lot of the men at that time were treated for VD using mercury. Most of these guys lived to see their forties even though had been treated with mercury. Sure, 40 is not very long to live. But they also had one hell of a life to live. A-lot worse than we.
Anyway, I'm not condemning the idea of controlling the amount of mercury used in products and dumped into landfills to leach into ground water. I am saying toughen up a bit. Life is not guaranteed (though some American lawyers would have you think so). Worry your entire life about some mercury, and you end up walking in front of a buss. All because you are a pansy who is preoccupied with worrying.
Mercury is CFL units is not as bad as some would have you think. A little education and common respect will do a great deal to help the effort. The biggest threat of mercury is in coal burning power plants. But we never hear about that do we? People would rather bitch about the huge energy saver(which saves megatons of coal thus reducing a great amount of mercury emissions) than bitch about the actual coal burning.
