Mercury in tv's and comp moniters - Page 2

Originally Posted by Hypoman

I said that and I am not wrong. I took two apart last week and they both had a sticker on them that said this: caution: cathode ray tube containing mercury... and it looked like fluorescent bulbs to me!..........

Are you sure you didn't misread it? That sounds more like a cold cathode fluorescent lamp, which still contains mercury but around 85% less of it than old fluorescents. CCFLs are commonly used to backlight LCD monitors, although LEDs have replaced them in TVs and high-end monitors for the most part. If it said cathode ray tube and looked like a fluorescent bulb, it was labeled wrong. To answer the original question, each monitor-sized CCFL bulb has less than 1mg of mercury in it, and when the bulb is off around 90% of it is condensed on the surface, mixed in with any coating used to diffuse the light. It's almost certainly not profitable to try to recover it, but on the positive side you don't really have to worry about health effects from broken bulbs unless you're doing something dumb like running a bulb crusher without a filter (still not sure how anyone thought that was a good idea.)

Florescent lamps contain Mercury in vapor form. When you turn them on the electricity excites the vapor and you have light. It eventually depletes itself over the life of the lamp. I am not a scientist but I do not think recovering Mercury from these is practical or even possible.