Frank and I believe in the Green Movement. We recycle, walk when we can, and have put fluorescent bulbs in all of our light fixtures. The change from incandescent bulbs to fluorescent bulbs has cut our electricity bill by about a third (the fluorescents save three-quarters of the electricity of incandescents). But today, we lost four months of savings in the span of one second when Frank accidentally broke a fluorescent bulb while changing it.

It all started when I hopped into the shower this morning. The bathroom light started flickering. So I called Mr. Fix-It. Frank appeared, armed with a new fluorescent. Still bleary-eyed from waking up, he took out the old bulb. The bulb slipped from his hand, crashed onto the tile floor and shattered. “Okay, that’s bad. Real bad,” he said, seeming stunned. “Why?” I asked. “It’s just a bulb.” I envisioned picking up the pieces and vacuuming up the rest. “Uh…” he replied, “it’s a fluorescent. This is bad. Uh. Don’t breathe.” I’ve heard this phrase many times from him while in the bathroom, but apparently there was real danger here other than a bad attack of nausea. “I’m stuck here,” I replied. He said, “You need to get out of there, don’t breathe, don’t step in any of this and get out of here.” I complied, but breathed anyway, figuring passing out on top of the broken bulb would be a worse fate.

When I finally escaped from the bathroom, Frank closed the door and turned off the heat. He looked very upset. “I just read about this. This is bad. Mercury vapor and powder are in fluorescent bulbs and are super toxic.” I suggested he look online for directions on how to clean up the mess. He found instructions on the EPA website. What a shocker. (http://www.epa.gov/mercury/spills/index.htm#fluorescent)

If you break a fluorescent bulb, basically, you’re screwed. Your household becomes a temporary Super Fund toxic waste dump. Here’s a Readers’ Digest version of the six-step procedure to clean up a broken fluorescent bulb. First, you open a window and evacuate the room. Turn off the heating system, make sure no one walks through the glass and powder. Let the room air out for at least fifteen minutes. (We didn’t do this. I stood there, dripping wet, and breathed in all the fumes, thereby saving Frank and the cat…) Put on rubber gloves, use cardboard to scoop up the fragments. Throw fragments into a glass jar or plastic bag that can be sealed. Use tape to pick up any remaining fragments or powder. Wipe the area clean with disposable wet wipes, discard into the glass jar or plastic bag.

You can’t use a vacuum cleaner or you’ll contaminate not only the vacuum cleaner, but the entire air supply of the household. Forever. Nor can you use a broom. If the powder or fragments land on a rug or clothing or bedding, you have to seal the bedding and garments and rugs in a plastic bag and throw them away. If you’re in the room when the bulb breaks, you have to wash the clothes you were wearing during the exposure to the mercury vapor. If powder and fragments land on carpet, you use tape to get as much up as you can, then vacuum up the rest. (This is the only instance where vacuuming is recommended.) Then you must discard the vacuum bag in a sealed plastic bag. Then, get this, for the next “several times” you use the vacuum you have to turn off the forced air heat or air conditioning, open a window, then vacuum, then wait fifteen minutes, then you can close the window and turn back on the heat.

Have you followed all this? Is this insane? I read online where a woman busted a bulb in her kid’s room (http://tinyurl.com/d8cfah). She had the room tested for mercury and the place where she dropped the bulb was highly contaminated. She was told to tear out the carpets and throw away all the contaminated objects in the room. She was so freaked out, she sealed off the room and they don’t use it anymore. All these contaminants? From one bulb breaking?

These stupid pieces of crap are supposed to be “saving the environment.” By poisoning it? The bulbs carry a only small warning label on them. They don’t list the procedure for disposal. The label only states that if a bulb breaks, follow proper disposal procedures. For the normal person this means picking up the pieces and vacuuming up the rest. But this will completely poison your household.

How many bloody people know this? And how many people are going to remember to go through this lockdown procedure every time they use the vacuum cleaner after they clean up a broken bulb? Uh, no one. Who is going to throw out the clothes they wore when the bulb broke? No one, except for Frank and I. I also threw out two new bathroom rugs. Frank and I spent an hour cleaning the stupid bathroom. I tracked mercury powder all over my house before Frank read the clean-up procedures online. And these clean-up recommendations were from the EPA, an organization that denied global warming until last year. The most toothless, bought-by-the-chemical-companies, useless public agency in existence. I shudder to think how poisoned my house really is. How much I just shortened my lifespan by being stuck in a room when a stupid fluorescent bulb broke.

After our morning fun, I wanted to banish the bulbs from our house. Frank refused, citing the (same) EPA website that shows how much mercury gets into the air by coal-burning plants and how much mercury pollution is saved by fluorescent bulbs. I reluctantly agreed. Lesser of two evils and all that. But my last question to him was: “Why is any mercury getting into the environment? Why can’t we find clean energy that’s actually CLEAN?” Frank replied, “Money.”

Like I needed another lesson in that.

©2009, Janet Periat