i learned that there is now an international movement to curb the use of mercury in various products, and yes this includes many types of fluorescent lighting! here's the link:

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=43963&Cr=mercury&Cr1=#.UQOkI44wLzI

It is not that "hot".
But it is true, than most of (mainly selfballasted) CFL's of today have way too much mercury per lumen*hour product, but the main reason is not the mercury itself, but the low efficacy and extremely short life of these products. And it were the CFL's, what was mentioned there.
But the today's energy (mainly the electricity) production play way more prominent role in mercury release, so it is really important to reduce the energy needs. But that should be done from aspects, where the energy use savings come the easiest and that is with the largest consumers: So for homes it is the transportation (was it really necessary to have French bottled water at the environmental conference held in Tokyo?) and home thermal management (heating, air conditioning, laundry and hot water). The lighting consume so little portion, it become way contraproductive to force people to spend money on expensive lighting instead of using them to e.g. upgrade the home thermal insulation instead.

Well, they use the example of 3rd world slaves using mercury in the open to extract gold, as a shocking example for how mercury is bad. Nevermind nob one is exposed to liquid mercury in the lamp industry (amalgam everywhere)

Demagogy everyone ?

I think the example of the Evian served at the conference about the climate change in Japan was very good example about how these movements really work: Blah, blah, blah, global warming, blah, blah, blah, pollution, blah, blah, blah...

i agree its nothing but corruption! btw i learned that the article stated an external electrode fluorescent lamp, which is sorta some kind of a linear induction lamp that i never knew about. i suppose the hot cathode linear fluorescent lamp is safe for now.

Such lamp must be capacitively coupled (as you cannot inductively couple into a lamp which is not a closed loop)

But there is another issue : How sure can you be that they even know wat they are talking about ? For all we know they might just call a plain fluorescet lamp an "external cathode lamp" out of lack of better knowledge. Or maybe thy are about T12s with external starting strip ? (this would even make sense, cold temperature lamps are more likely to use liquid mercury)

"External electrode" are the inductions: They need external capacitively coupled electrodes with high voltage on them for ignition.
But it is true, these people do not know any bit of what they are talking. They only hijacked some scientific works, that stated "the mankind contribution could be more than negligible" and run their career on that. End the arguments like "The scientific works state only <could> and not <for sure is>" they dismiss that with "we have to be preliminary careful"...

So be carefull! Promote lamp recycling!

Or longer life lamps ..


BG

I would prefer both ways at the same time: Use longer lifetime lamps and recycle them properly...