Is the mercury in fluorescent lightbulbs anything to worry about?

[nilecroc]

I accidentally broke one in my room. It's mostly mostly cleaned  up, but do I need to do anything else? I opened up one window for about ten minutes?

[dallen68]

Run the vacuum. Unless you step on a piece of the glass, you should be safe.

[Ibrahim90]

I accidentally broke one in my room. It's mostly mostly cleaned  up, but do I need to do anything else? I opened up one window for about ten minutes?

just clean the place up: you did what you could. it's not as if you're basically eating that stuff to become immortal...like some other people I know..

[MrBogosity]

Make sure it was well-ventilated. A lot of the mercury in those things is vapor.

[evensgrey]

Firstly, the dominant predictor of the mercury content is the age of the CFL device:  The older ones have much more (for a given value of 'much more') mercury in them than the never ones.

By 'much more', however, I mean the older ones might have as much as 5 mg per bulb, while newer ones have less than 1 mg per bulb.

Don't worry about the mercury released from a single bulb, worry about the glass fragments.