Wouldn’t it be nice to have an option of purchasing a shatterproof CFL light bulb, so in case the bulb breaks the mercury stays contained within the bulb? Even though Environmental Protection Agency issued a thorough clean up procedure for mercury spills including broken CFL bulbs, many consumers still have concerns with using CFL bulbs in their house. I happen to share this concern since I have a toddler, a dog, a cat and an oblivious husband!

So is there a solution?

Apparently there is a company called Shat-R-Shield, that takes ordinary CFL bulbs and coats them with plastic shatterproof coating. Sadly their focus market is only industrial, like food-processing facilities, laboratories, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and food serving facilities, like restaurants and food preparation places.

I happened to call them to see if it would be possible for someone like me to make a purchase from them and the response was no.  They only sell in bulk to distributors, who then sell directly to the industries above.

So I started pocking and prodding their website trying to understand why this is not yet available to the general public. Apparently, the disposal procedure is not as easy for the coated bulbs as for regular CFLs. Regular CFLs can be simply dropped off at the special recycling places. But the coated CFLs need to be stripped off of the protective coating before they can be recycled.  So you either do it yourself, or you find a  recycling company that will do it for you.  The charge varies based on the type of bulb, but most fall under a dollar per bulb.

I also didn’t happen to ask about the cost of bulbs when I called Shat-R-Shield. The cost of final product might be higher than the average consumer would be willing to pay.  But I can only speculate on this for now.

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