Hey Ya!
One of the most oft-repeated claims about cast-out "e-Waste" is that the CRTs are full of cadmium phosphors.
Some time ago, I was researching MSDS sheets for our recycling facility's Environmental Health and Safety manual, and to answer questions for one of our monthy plantwide safety meetings.
Here is some interesting correspondence from an expert in Cadmium phosphors, retired professor Robert Dodds of University California San Diego.
"I don’t know why they would be worried about the Cadmium in the phosphor because I doubt there are any TVs that are 40 years old that haven’t been scrapped by now. At most, there might be a total of 4 to 5 grams of green phosphor on the tube. The tubes are also easy to tell because the they don’t have the carbon matrix around the phosphor and the phosphor is in a “dot matrix” rather than the “block matrix”. Besides that the Cadmium is present in a low energy crystalline structure, hexagonal sulfide, that can only be released by strong acid which would also result in the generation of hydrogen sulfide which is a much greater health problem than cadmium."
