Autumn re-runs; Break a CFL? Don't panic.
This post ran originally on 23 April 2009 . Few things irritate me more than panic spawned by ignorance and scientific illiteracy. A shocking amount of pseudo-scientific nonsense gets run as gospel by the Huffington Post, almost as much as the nonsense spewed out by Fox News. Ignorance and panic peddling know no politics.
Math and technology are how human beings come to apprehend the sector. For a few cause that attitude's taken into consideration to be suspect with the aid of a whole lot of humans. I will in no way understand that suspicion. The international's a risky vicinity and eliminating all hazard is impossible. Furthermore, everything is a ability toxin, the entirety. So plenty in order that the term toxin is meaningless. Toxicity is dose. Period. Sure, ingesting a cup of mercury will kill you, however so will consuming a gallon of water in a half of an hour. Should we ban water as it's a toxin? Individual CFLs are not a problem. A landfill full of them is. So use them, be realistic and recycle them as soon as they're burned out.
The key to all of that is to understand what level of exposure to something is not going to purpose harm. That's no longer information you are going to get from the Huffington Post, Fox News or all and sundry else who has an interest in you being scared. Science is your pal.
Lisa Sharkey had a bit in the day gone by's Huffington Post where she described her panic over a broken compact fluorescent light bulb in her home. She then indexed a series of clean up tactics that could handiest were written with the aid of a non-public damage lawyer. Sheesh. Calm down already!
All fluorescent light bulbs comprise elemental mercury. That includes the lengthy, skinny ones in places of work and faculties. Elemental mercury is a certainly-going on heavy metallic that is also a neurotoxin in excessive enough doses. Elemental mercury is a liquid at room temperature and it evaporates right into a gasoline easily. That gasoline glows when power passes thru it. Hence its use in mild bulbs. Mercury has an extended list of realistic uses and is located in everything from Mercurochrome to mascara. High concentrations of elemental mercury are greater unfavourable as a fuel than as a solid, so there are some practical precautions you'll need to take should you smash this kind of bulbs.
But allow's get a little perspective first and perform a little math.
Let's say you smash a CFL containing five milligrams of mercury in your infant?S bedroom. Further, shall we embrace that bedroom has a volume of 25 cubic meters (that's a medium-sized bedroom). For the sake of instance, permit's expect that the complete 5 milligrams of mercury in the bulb vaporizes immediately. This would bring about an airborn concentration of zero.2 milligrams in step with cubic meter. This attention will decrease with time, as air within the room leaves and is changed via air from outside or from a distinct room. So even in case you do nothing, the concentrations of mercury within the room will likely technique zero after about an hour or so.
Under these especially conservative assumptions, this level and duration of mercury publicity isn't risky, considering that it's decrease than the USA Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standard of zero.05 milligrams per cubic meter of metallic mercury vapor averaged over eight hours.
To equate the extent of publicity in our broken bulb scenario with OSHA's eight-hour wellknown Imagine the instantaneous stage of mercury in the room right away after the bulb broke to be 0.2 milligrams of mercury consistent with cubic meter. If we count on the air in the room modifications every hour, then the 8-hour average attention could be .0.5 milligrams according to cubic meter.
See? No want to panic. While I would not name it innocent exactly, it's now not some thing you need to name a Hazmat team over.
So, in the occasion that you damage a CFL, open a window to speed up the dispersal of the mercury vapor. If it makes you sense higher, depart the room for a 1/2 an hour. Then come again and clean up the damaged glass.