mm spake thus:

Baltimore County just started accepting, at one of its solid waste
facilities, tv's, computer monitors, vcr's, and some other electronic
things.

How much recycling is actually done to these things and how important
is it to recycle them?

They always mention lead first as a dangerous substance in tv's and
monitors, but it seems to me, all the lead is in the front panel of
the CRT, and it can't escape to poison the earth. Even if the glass
is broken, only a little surface is exposed, and I'm not sure if even
the lead along that surface can escape.

First of all, not true: think about all the solder on the circuit
boards. Until manufacturers go to completely lead-free solder (ugh),
there'll be plenty of Pb besides in the tube.

It's not so much a matter of the lead "escaping" (I'm guessing you're
visualizing it going off into the air somehow) as leaching into water in
a landfill, where it can form all kinds of lead-containing compounds
that can come back to poison us. So yes, it's a real problem, not just
something that some environmental bureaucrat dreamed up.


--
"In 1964 Barry Goldwater declared: 'Elect me president, and I
will bomb the cities of Vietnam, defoliate the jungles, herd the
population into concentration camps and turn the country into a
wasteland.' But Lyndon Johnson said: 'No! No! No! Don't you dare do
that. Let ME do it.'"

- Characterization (paraphrased) of the 1964 Goldwater/Johnson
presidential race by Professor Irwin Corey, "The World's Foremost
Authority."