MORE CFL = LESS MECURY.  Surprisingly, CFLs reduce mecury emissions which primarly come from coal-fired energy plants.

A coal-fired power plant produces 13.6 milligrams of mercury to produce electricity required to use a regular incandescent light bulb, compared to 3.3 milligrams for a CFL.

Properly disposing of your Compact Fluorescent light bulbs is important and documentation may be required by the EPA for certain businesses.  Residential light bulb owners do not have the same rules but you can still recycle your bulbs.

Planet Bulb offer Veolia fluorescent lamp recycling.  You order a postage paid box or bucket that you an fill with your spent bulbs.  FedEx will pick the box up whenever you have filled the box whether it takes 1 week or years!  If your company does need EPA documentation Veolia will provide all of the necessary paperwork to show that you are compliant.

Compact fluorescent bulbs contain small amounts of mercury. The mercury poses no threat while in the bulb, but if you break one be careful not to inhale the mercury - immediately use a wet rag to clean it up and put all of the pieces, and the rag, into a plastic bag.

Although household CFL bulbs may legally be disposed of with regular trash (in the US), they are categorized as household hazardous waste. As long as the waste is sent to a modern municipal landfill, the hazard to the environment is limited. However, CFL's should not be sent to an incinerator, which would disperse the mercury into the atmosphere.

Check to see where in your area you can dispose of CFL’s:
http://www.earth911.org

The best solution is to save spent CFL's for a community household hazardous waste collection, which would then send the bulbs to facilities capable of treating, recovering or recycling them. For more information on CFL disposal or recycling, you can contact your local municipality.

Although CFL's have these handling and disposal issues, the large energy savings of CFL bulbs compared to incandescent is of greater overall environmental benefit.