I don't care about the lightbulbs in my house. They present no hazard if the mercury is contained. What I care about are the millions of these things that we are going to be putting into our municipal solid waste landfills.

Businesses are required to dispose of fluorescent light tubes as universal waste and have them recycled because of their mercury content. People can take them to their local household hazardous waste centers to dispose of them properly so the mercury can be recycled, but 99.5% of households won't take the time to do this, so they will end up in our landfills, continuing to pollute our soils and water. Later when we do "clean" it up, we won't actually make much of a difference. We'll waste a lot of money studying it to death, remove a little bit of contamination, leaving the rest, and then write a risk assessment summary to show how the number of people who end up getting cancer from exposure to the site is within certain tolerances.

What a cosmically stupid idea. It makes me very sad. On the positive side, at least I will continue to be employed for a very long time. (My job is to help remediate these sites after the damage is done).