Funny thing is the mercury vapour lamp, before they went to the rubbish low mercury stuff, was pretty much the nearly everlasting lamp, in that in a street lighting application you could simply do a group relamp every 10 years, and in the interim you might have 5-10% of the lamps fail over that period, with the majority still providing around 70% of the light output after the 10 years had passed. You find plenty of 125W MV lamps still in residential use in the USA, on dusk to dawn, and probably still there since the 1980's, providing light to old buildings all over the USA, and not likely to be changed out till they fail. With the original GE or Westinghouse lamp in them, which stayed basicaly the same since the late 1960's when they had figured out how to make a robust lamp, and before the MBA take over which wanted a 5 year life in them, so they cut the area of emitter, cut the arc tube length and cu the mercury dose down.
In street light use it is easy to recycle, you have enough lamps, enough volume all at once, and the crews going out with the right packaging to protect the removed lamps as they replace them, and a box as well. Easy to simply get them, crush and sort into the glass, wash off the phosphor for reuse, wash out the mercury with the phosphor, separate the metals, and do 3 melts to separate out the lead solder, the steel wire and finally sinter the tungsten back into wire.