Speaking of Precision

What the EPA does not tell you is that 40% of the mercury vapor in the air comes from volcanoes. Another 40% comes from burning fossil fuels. And nobody wants to upset the oil producers because it hurts us in the wallet.

The evaporation rate of liquid mercury is on the order of 56 µg/litre at 25 °C and actually that is subject to surface area, heat transfer, and atmospheric pressure. Not to mention that the density will cause it to hang around on the floor which means you probably won't be breathing it unless you passed out from the panic you experienced when you broke the bulb. Really your biggest concern at this point would be from blood loss due to landing on top of the broken glass.

Mercury bonds quickly with other metals. If you can even find it, let it bond with a copper penny and you will have it fairly well contained at a fraction of the cost of some of the other junk for sale.

Mercury occurs naturally in the air and water. Gold prospectors still use it to gather up small particals of gold. Then they burn it off with a torch, but their daily exposure is much higher than you would get from crushing fluorescent lamps all day long for a year. The hat makers of a hundred years ago, known as "Mad Hatters" were exposed to heated mercury in a large vat. It took time and repeated exposure to have this effect so a single fluorescent lamp is nowhere near that level of threat. People who worked in sloppy lamp factories could be exposed to levels above OSHA recommendations. No lamp manufacturer has ever had "Mad Hatters" despite their sloppy handling practices. Plenty of employees have had their minimum exposure levels exceed the OSHA recomendations without any known long term consequences.

Lastly, this whole fear over mercury exposure was used as a marketing strategy recently in the USA and all the US manufacturers invested millions of dollars to reduce the actual mercury used to something you would be hard pressed to find with a magnifying glass. In fact, the leading advocate of reduced mercury had such poor control that a high percentage of their products suffered from mercury starvation. Mercury starvation in a fluorescent lamp causes the light output to be reduced to an argon glow (a red/purple glow) at about 5% of the normal light level. Manufacturers of lamps in some other countries, however, present a higher risk level.

Probably the highest chance of unintended exposure is to be downwind of a waste processor that incenerates their trash. Broken lamps mixed in with trash can be burned releasing all of the liquid mercury in the form of vapor. And no trash processor is going to be effective at eliminating all of the toxic materials released. Because of this, many cities have instituted separate collection points for lamp disposal. The concept of a lamp recycler is a hoax. Separation of components is very inefficient and the major byproduct is landfill.