Mercury thermometer lab spill protocol change

Mercury has been used for thousands of years. It was an interesting material. When I was an undergraduate student, if you broke a mercury thermometer in the lab you just kind of swept it up and threw it in the trash. Now we have these mercury spill kits — you put some sulfur on it and it forms mercury sulfide to lower the vapor pressure. We'd just play with mercury, take some gold ring and put mercury on it and you could destroy it and make it brittle with liquid-metal embrittlement. One of the problems now is fluorescent light bulbs. We've replaced them now with LEDs, but the fluorescent light bulbs were taking over for the incandescent light bulbs because they use less energy. They also had to use some mercury to start — you needed to vaporize, get a metallic vapor that was conductive, and mercury was basically the only thing that worked well. Now we're using less compact fluorescents.

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When I was a student and you broke a mercury thermometer in the lab, you'd just go get some sulfur and sprinkle it on the floor to make mercury sulfide to tie it up. Or you just swept it into the corner and let it vaporize into the room for the next six months. I'm not kidding. Nowadays you've got to call out the EPA, and they're going to come in with their hazmat suits, cordon off the whole room, declare it a disaster area for the next six months while they vacuum it out for only half a million dollars. I'm not kidding.