When A 'Curly' Lightbulb Breaks

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When A 'Curly' Lightbulb Breaks

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2008/11/when_a_lightbulb_brea

ks.html

Add to the list of things no parent especially wants to hear:

" Mom, my reading lamp fell over, and the light bulb broke. It was one

of those curly ones. "

That's what my 12-year-old son told me the other day as I sat working

at my desk.

Cleaning up a broken light bulb isn't fun; those little shards of

glass scatter everywhere. But when the bulb is " one of those curly

ones, " suddenly I realized I was dealing with a potentially toxic

situation.

The curly bulb is of course a compact fluorescent light bulb, coil-

shaped and valued by those of us who would save money and the

environment because it runs on less electricity than a standard

incandescent bulb. The complication: These bulbs contain a little bit

of mercury, and when they break, that mercury vapor is released.

In this case, into my son's bedroom.

After commending the boy for getting out of the room and coming to me

right away, I did what we all do these days: I Googled for

information about how to clean up safely. Several sites, including

that of the federal Environmental Protection Agency dispensed the

same advice:

Open the window and keep everyone (including pets) out of the room

for 15 minutes.

Don't vacuum or sweep.

Use pieces of stiff cardboard to pick up as much as you can; deposit

the stuff into a lidded glass jar (such as a Mason jar) or a sealable

plastic bag.

Use duct tape to pick up the smaller bits. Then use a disposable wet

wipe to swab the area down. Deposit all cleaning materials in the jar

or bag.

If the bulb's landed on a carpet or rug: don't vacuum until you've

thoroughly removed all the light-bulb debris, again using duct tape

to pick up small pieces. Remove the bag and dispose of it

immediately.

Take the jar or bag full of broken bulb and cleaning materials to the

outside trash; some areas have special requirements for disposing of

such hazardous materials. Find those here.

I did my best. The base of the bulb remained screwed into the lamp --

which wouldn't fit in any jar -- so I just threw the whole thing into

a trash bag and double bagged it.

After the initial drama, I had time to wonder how much mercury my son

had actually been exposed to and what harm it may have done. So I

called a couple of pediatrician/researchers who know a lot about

environmental risks to kids: Hal Strelnick, a professor of family and

social medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and an

attending physician at Montefiore Medical Center the Bronx and Dana

Best of the Children's National Medical Center in D.C.

Both put my mind at ease. While prolonged exposure to mercury is

known to cause neurological and kidney damage, the amount released

from that single bulb in this isolated instance poses a relatively

small risk, especially to a child as old as my son, they said. The

greatest risk would be to a baby or toddler, the doctors explained,

whose neurological systems and organs are rapidly developing;

developing fetuses are also at higher risk of damage from mercury

exposure.

Because mercury vapor is heavier than air, Stelnick explains, it

sinks toward the floor, so a crawling baby in my son's room would

have been more likely harmed than would my big galoot of a boy.

" There's no good mercury in the body, " Stelnick says. While the risk

to my son from this one exposure was probably quite low, the truth is

that while " a very small amount of mercury is released when we break

a fluorescent bulb, we don't know what that can do, " as Best

says. " It's almost impossible to measure that amount in the body. So

we really don't have good evidence for low levels of mercury. "

Best adds that she, like many adults of a certain age, remembers

being exposed to mercury as a child. (I myself remember playing with

liquid mercury, watching it roll around in the palm of my hand.) " We

seem to be functioning fine, " she notes.

In the grand scheme of things, Best adds, my son (or any child) " is

much more likely to get hurt in a car accident, get in a school

fight, or be sickened by secondhand smoke than to get harmed by that

amount of mercury " released from the bulb.

" When we rank these kinds of harm, " Best says, " it can become clear

very quickly that there are other things we'd have you worry about. "

Such as the broken glass.

Still, every new technology seems to introduce new hazards. Do you

worry about mercury exposure? And did you once play with mercury,

too?