Recently, my daughter did a science report on mercury (lower case, not the planet), the element whose periodic table abbreviation is Hg. As far as I knew mercury was just that silver liquid that appears in old-fashioned thermometers, but thanks to her report I learned that mercury also shows up in certain kinds of light bulbs, including the green darling compact fluorescent lights or CFLs.

While this made for an interesting tidbit in a science project, it was a cause for concern on another level. After reading a recent Associated Press story on CFLs, specifically how dangerous it can be to simply throw them away, I realized that we still hadn’t come up with a plan for what to do when these bulbs need to be replaced. That is, not every place around recycles them, and, because of the mercury content, you shouldn’t throw them in the trash.

Normally, my first stop when figuring out where I can recycle anything is Earth 911. And so I plugged “CFL” and my zip code into Earth 911′s search box, and I came up with a couple of places that can recycle them. One offered a drop-off program; another requires you to purchase prepaid shipping labels to send the CFLs in via FedEx for recycling.

Thanks to this aforementioned AP story, I then headed over to the Association of Lighting and Mercury Recyclers’ website to see if it could help. On the home page I saw the phrase “member recyclers” and I clicked on it, which brought up a national map. When I clicked again, the map reappeared with “bubbles” I could click on to find a recycler that was local to me. One of them was the same company I found on Earth 911.

You can also check out the Environmental Protection Agency’s website for more information on how to recycle CFLs.

Here’s another option to consider: the next time you go shopping at IKEA, bring your used CFLs with you. IKEA has CFL recycling bins available in all of its stores and will take back your bulbs for free. (I’m assuming that since you don’t need to show a receipt or anything before dropping off the CFLs that they’ll take back bulbs that you bought at any store.)

If you’re a business owner and would like to offer a similar CFL recycling program, you can purchase recycling kits from CFL manufacturer Osram Sylvania. I suppose if you’re desperate and have no other option for recycling CFLs, such as you don’t live close enough to an IKEA to recycle bulbs for free, you could purchase these kits for your own use as Joe consumer. (The cheapest recycling kit, which holds 15 bulbs, costs $39.) I don’t know but paying to recycle stuff like this just feels wrong. Wouldn’t it be smarter for a company like Sylvania to offer some kind of coupon with their bulbs for free recycling? Wouldn’t that make people buy more of their bulbs in the long run?

Finally, if I lived in a place like Madison, Wisconsin, or in Vermont or Maine, I wouldn’t have to worry about this at all. These locations require retailers that sell CFLs to take them back for recycling. If only all 50 states were so progressive.