This has been my opinion for a very long time, that the waste products of CFL and LED lighting will end up being serious problems to everyone eventually.
Not only the problems associated with disposal of these lighting products, but also the pollution from the byproducts of manufacturing them.
How much coal needs to be burned to manufacture an LED or CFL lamp, sort of assessment.
Also, as wiseasses will say "don't eat the lamps" however most of the products made in China quickly end up in landfills around the world, although I suppose it's a delightful fantasy to believe that the liners used in those pits will never fail and release all those metals, toxins and plastic residues into water supplies. Wake the f*ck up.
Not only are toxins inside LEDs and the glass tubes of CFLs, but also in the electrolytic capacitors and other components inside these lightling products.
As China will very likely be manufacturing all this great new technology will be produced, by the lowest bidder, with the cheapest components available AND with lead-free solder and any other imaginable manufacturing shortcuts.. the reliability of these new lamps will probably be shorter than a decent incandescent lamp.
While the sheep flock to buy the new LED products labeled with statements like "30 year life" or "50,000 hours average life" they won't even recall how those thermal windows were pitched as "they'll pay for themselves" when they made the payment of a couple or several thousand dollars for them. As those windows have all fallen apart by now, and been replaced with even more expensive products at higher installation costs, so it's all just water under the bridge.
The environmental impact of common incandescent lamps will likely be very small to the problems associated with the newest greatest products.
Glass is still being used for CFLs so the manufacturing energy costs can't be significantly less.
I have yet to see a CFL lamp last longer than 2 years, and the majority of them that I've owned haven't come cloe to that (I mark the date on the bases when I put them into use). These are CFL lamps of various brands (not the cheapest I could find) that are packaged as 5 year or 7 year useful life lamps.
I've found LEDs to be very practical for use in flashlights, but they don't light a room worth a damn. OTOH, I have a portable worklight with 180 LEDs, and it's hardly more useful than a common incandescent flashlight of 30 years ago.
Flashlight batteries don't produce power spikes or surges the way AC power sources do, and without good suppression and/or regulation components driving up the manufacturing costs, the LED lamps will likely be too easily damaged to make them practical in many applications.
The other advantage to battery power is it's already low voltage which is what LEDs operate on.. dropping spiking/surging 120VAC to a low DC voltage requires stable circuitry.. which is only reliable if better quality components are used, not bottom of the barrel, minimumally adequate components.