CFL bulb broken & tracked through out house - help
February 1, 2024 9:31 PM Subscribe
I’ve read what’s on here about broken CFL bulbs and kids. Two broke in our basement and our seven-year-old twins were right there; immediately we left the basement and spent about one minute upstairs with the door shut to the basement before leaving for the garage. I went back in holding my breath, but not thinking about I exposure, unfortunately to open up most of the windows and gather a purse and some clothes. We left and stayed in a hotel.
The problem is that we didn’t clean it up and we have two cats that we did not contain. They are still at home, and I feel terribly about how this might affect them but even worse, I’m thinking about their tracking the dust/phosphorus/mercury throughout the house.
So how do I clean this up now? I understand the main danger is inhaling it, but if it’s tracked, what’s to say that months from now our kids are not playing in the living room and they step on or sit on or touch or otherwise interact with a chunk of that bulb that got tracked there?
Suggestions? I’ve already got a call into environmental folks and have been madly googling. Please do not just say I will be fine without actually knowing that. I’m really tired of the disingenuous. Don’t worry about it stuff.
Best answer: Clickable epa how to clean up a broken CFL bulb link
posted by zippy at 12:02 AM on February 2, 2024 [1 favorite]
posted by zippy at 12:02 AM on February 2, 2024 [1 favorite]
I am writing this as someone with a lot of anxiety about these bulbs, and I have broken them and cleaned them up before. The bulb contains less than 1/100th of the mercury found in a thermometer. The clean up procedure suggestions are “best practice” but the EPA itself says not to even worry about it if you did not actually do them. I know this might sound like a disingenuous “don’t worry” position, but think about how many of these light bulbs are broken in so many places people, including children, routinely go, sit, eat at, without this level of precaution. People aren’t dying everywhere of mercury poisoning. But again, look at the EPA site, where they are the ones who say clean it up according to protocol if you can but if you didn’t, clean it up as best you can and don’t worry about it. They say if you feel you’re experiencing health issues to call poison control. I would not recommend this, but when I was a child I and other kids played with literal balls of mercury from a broken thermometer and… nothing happened.
posted by ojocaliente at 1:15 AM on February 2, 2024 [18 favorites]
posted by ojocaliente at 1:15 AM on February 2, 2024 [18 favorites]
Just another vote for "it's probably ok": my 4th grade science class (in 1980-something, so we're not talking the dark ages) featured Ms. T. taking a bottle of liquid mercury and literally pouring a tablespoon into Kid #1's hand, who swirled it around and poked until until they had enough, and dumped it into Kid #2's hand... this process went until Kid #40 took whatever was still all in one place and dumped it back into the bottle so she could do it again next year. I can't say Ms. T. was lauded for best practices or anything, but we all lived to tell the tale.
posted by adekllny at 6:13 AM on February 2, 2024 [7 favorites]
posted by adekllny at 6:13 AM on February 2, 2024 [7 favorites]
If broken compact fluorescent lamps were a hazard worth fleeing the house and sheltering overnight in a hotel for, there's no way those lamps could ever have been sold as mass market consumer goods.
The poison is in the dose. Mercury is naturally eliminated by the body but only very slowly, so the most common route for taking damage from it involves continuous exposure from dietary or workplace or environmental sources. As long as nobody actually huffed your two broken CFLs right after breaking them, a single breakage like that is not going to deliver enough of a dose to cause detectable symptoms in you, or your kids, or your cats.
The mercury inside a fluorescent lamp is elemental mercury rather than a mercury compound better suited to biological absorption like methylmercury or dimethylmercury. The potential dose delivered by a broken CFL is also much lower than that from a broken traditional long fluorescent tube simply because the CFL is so compact compared to the old-school tube.
The most exposure anybody is likely to get from the phosphor coating in a fluorescent tube is via a cut from a coated glass shard because when a tube breaks, most of the phosphor is going to remain bonded to the glass; very little of it is going to break up into dust. Given the length of time that's elapsed since the breakage, there will be no mercury hanging around the breakage site any more and it should be completely safe to vacuum up the remains. When you vacuum up the glass, the phosphor will go with it and there won't be enough dust created to get past the vacuum cleaner's HEPA filter. If you're still concerned, don't vacuum until you've done the wet rags cleanup recommended by the EPA first.
Back in the 1950s it used to be common to find beryllium used as a component of fluorescent tube phosphors. Beryllium is nasty stuff, about as nasty as mercury. If it gets into a wound it can interfere with blood clotting and make that wound super slow to heal, but exactly because of that toxicity, it's no longer used in modern fluorescent tubes, compact or otherwise. The compounds that are used in modern tubes have low toxicity and a cut from a CFL glass shard should heal up about as fast as any other glass cut.
As for the possibility of being tracked through the house by little cat feet, I'd be more concerned about the broken glass per se than its phosphor-coated aspect. That said, I wouldn't expect to see a huge amount of tracking because I can't think of a reason why a cat would want to stamp all over a small pile of broken glass before wandering elsewhere.
TL;DR: smashing CFLs inside your house is certainly not a behaviour you'd want to indulge in routinely, but the occasional unavoidable breakage will almost certainly do no detectable harm.
I'm sorry about the "don't worry about it" tone, but it's coming from a place of being reasonably well informed about the chemistry and physics involved; I'm not being disingenuous.
posted by flabdablet at 11:48 PM on March 9, 2024
The poison is in the dose. Mercury is naturally eliminated by the body but only very slowly, so the most common route for taking damage from it involves continuous exposure from dietary or workplace or environmental sources. As long as nobody actually huffed your two broken CFLs right after breaking them, a single breakage like that is not going to deliver enough of a dose to cause detectable symptoms in you, or your kids, or your cats.
The mercury inside a fluorescent lamp is elemental mercury rather than a mercury compound better suited to biological absorption like methylmercury or dimethylmercury. The potential dose delivered by a broken CFL is also much lower than that from a broken traditional long fluorescent tube simply because the CFL is so compact compared to the old-school tube.
The most exposure anybody is likely to get from the phosphor coating in a fluorescent tube is via a cut from a coated glass shard because when a tube breaks, most of the phosphor is going to remain bonded to the glass; very little of it is going to break up into dust. Given the length of time that's elapsed since the breakage, there will be no mercury hanging around the breakage site any more and it should be completely safe to vacuum up the remains. When you vacuum up the glass, the phosphor will go with it and there won't be enough dust created to get past the vacuum cleaner's HEPA filter. If you're still concerned, don't vacuum until you've done the wet rags cleanup recommended by the EPA first.
Back in the 1950s it used to be common to find beryllium used as a component of fluorescent tube phosphors. Beryllium is nasty stuff, about as nasty as mercury. If it gets into a wound it can interfere with blood clotting and make that wound super slow to heal, but exactly because of that toxicity, it's no longer used in modern fluorescent tubes, compact or otherwise. The compounds that are used in modern tubes have low toxicity and a cut from a CFL glass shard should heal up about as fast as any other glass cut.
As for the possibility of being tracked through the house by little cat feet, I'd be more concerned about the broken glass per se than its phosphor-coated aspect. That said, I wouldn't expect to see a huge amount of tracking because I can't think of a reason why a cat would want to stamp all over a small pile of broken glass before wandering elsewhere.
TL;DR: smashing CFLs inside your house is certainly not a behaviour you'd want to indulge in routinely, but the occasional unavoidable breakage will almost certainly do no detectable harm.
I'm sorry about the "don't worry about it" tone, but it's coming from a place of being reasonably well informed about the chemistry and physics involved; I'm not being disingenuous.
posted by flabdablet at 11:48 PM on March 9, 2024
By the way: the amount of mercury remaining near the breakage site will be affected by whether or not the lamps were on when they broke. If they were, there will not have been any liquid mercury left inside it to hang about afterwards - it will all have been vapour, and will now be long gone. If the lamps were off, then there might be some mercury droplets remaining on the glass or near the breakage site that you might prefer not to risk vapourizing with your vacuum cleaner. But again, the amount of mercury inside two broken CFLs is very small.
posted by flabdablet at 12:28 AM on March 10, 2024
posted by flabdablet at 12:28 AM on March 10, 2024
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> If you have further questions, please call your local poison control center at 1-800-222-1222.
https://www.epa.gov/mercury/cleaning-broken-cfl#qi
posted by Mr. Papagiorgio at 10:09 PM on February 1, 2024 [1 favorite]