Whether you know it or not, ALL “flourescent lamps..including the tube type, have a small amount of mercury in them. And good ol’ incandescent bulbs also have a “cocktail” of gasses in them that, although aren’t in themselves as dangerous, they can make you sick if inhaled.

That pathetic demonstration on the video doesn’t show how hard these CFL’s are to break open either. Holy crap, I hit one accidentally in my stairwell with a ladder……all it did was break the plastic base. It still works! CFL’s are nowhere near as fragile as flourescent tubes.

Now I won’t discount the dangers of Mercury, but we all have to realize that Mercury-vapor lamps in the form of “tube flourescent” have been with us for many, many decades. There is no difference between them and CFL’s except the tube flourescent’s have about 100 times greater volumn of Mercury-vapor in them, than CFL’s do.

Yes…..be safe, and keep your family safe too, but don’t buy into everything you see on TV.

BTW……………If you don’t want your CFL’s anymore, send them to me.
I’m not “green” by any stretch of the imagination, but i do like a lower power bill at the end of the month.

I’m no greenie either, although I do believe that good stewrdship and responsible resource management are good qualities.

My angle (and I reread what I wrote, it is somewhat alarmist, LOL) on these things has to do with the kids and safety. You may know my wife and I run a daycare and have our own young kids and so child safety is a habitual response mechanism.

Simply looking at it from a dad’s perspective. The way the guy makes it sound in the video, we need to call in a HAZMAT team…heh heh.

OSHA no doubt had a hand in that presentation for the workplace.

cheers to the opposition party!

the dumbfucks!

I realize that most folks don’t have any idea that CFLs (or tubes for that matter)have Mercury in them
I also think the govt. is complicit in NOT telling the public everything negative about CFLs.

Cheers Bro………

I am a chemist and I can assure you the “cocktail” you referred to in the standard incandescent bulb will not make you sick unless you perhaps deliberately inhaled the contents of the bulb, but even then that would be due to oxygen displacement in your lungs, not due to some toxicity inherent in the gas. The gas in the incandescent bulb is primarily argon, which is inert and incidentally has a greater concentration in our air than the much malignedCO2.

For me there are several issues regarding these silly CFLs. First of all I have found that in many applications they just don’t last and in fact have replaced more of the CFLs in my house home than incandescent. I moved into my home 5 1/2 years ago and have only replaced a handful of the standard incandescent but have replaced several of the small CFLs that I installed about 2-3 years ago. And since they cost 5 - 10 times more money the energy savings does not offset the cost of the bulb. And when you factor in the hazardous nature of the bulb it’s just not worth it to me. In addition I simply don’t care for the light that they cast. However in my workshop it is entirely lit by 8 foot fluorescent industrial lights. These are without the best. But even these are only good for approximately 2000 starts. That is what seems to doom the CFLs as well.

In about 3 years or so I am going to buy about 200 bucks worth of good quality GE incandescent bulbs so I will never run out and will have a large stockpile of bulbs for my house and will never have to even purchase the silly little CFL.

This entire issue is predicated on the lie of global warming. If global warming isn’t true than this entire issue dries up and blows away. But this needs to be forced down our collective throats in order to help ensure the brain washing continues.

I would encourage everyone to check out the Petition Project at http://www.oism.org/pproject/ , this is a petition of over 30,000 scientists like myself who do not believe in the myth of global warming. In fact there is incontrovertible evidence that shows that the sun is responsible for warming and cooling trends and that even small increases in CO2 concentrations have lead to huge increases in plant growth and made crops more drought tolerant.

Bash, if you run a story the Petition Project that would be great.