I've been slowly changing bulbs in my home to CF bulbs. As long as you dispose of them properly, the Hg issue with CF bulbs shouldn't be a problem. Each bulb only has enough mercury in it to form a globule the size of the ball on a ballpoint pen. That's nothing compared to old-school mercury thermometers we used to put in our mouths...

And IIRC, even with the mercury in the CF bulbs, if everybody switched over to them, less mercury would be released into the environment than if we stuck with incandescent bulbs. That's because the additional power used to light incandescent bulbs comes mostly from burning coal, which releases quite a bit of mercury vapor into the atmosphere.

Incidentally, a couple local reservoirs now have catch-and-release rules for fishing - you can't eat the fish anymore because they're contaminated with mercury. The mercury came from emissions from a nearby coal-burning power plant.

Ideally, even CF bulbs should be replaced with LEDs. LED lighting is doable today, but very expensive. The technology will improve, resulting in cheaper LED lights and better aesthetics, coming from better light color & more compact fixtures. That and LEDs don't have mercury in them.