How light bulb recycling works
How do you recycle a light bulb? While there are hundreds of jokes about changing a light bulb, recycling one is no joke! Since they’re one of our core categories, we wanted to shed some light on this for you. That’s why we visited Clean Earth, our lightbulbs recycling partners in the Bay Area, to learn how this works first hand. The hard working team at Clean Earth recycles over 5,000 light bulbs per hour and our visit with them was illuminating, to say the least. Here’s what we learned, starting with the basics.
Why are lightbulbs hard to recycle?
Not all light bulbs are equally hard to recycle. Old-school incandescents (the ones with the glowing hot wire inside) are relatively straightforward, since the components (glass and metal) are all recyclable and safe to process. The tricky lightbulbs are fluorescents, the long tubes you see in retail stores, offices, and classrooms, and their compact cousins, which you increasingly find inside of homes these days. Both are a popular option for lighting homes due to their energy efficiency, but they also contain small amounts of mercury. The reason they have mercury is that it lets them use electricity to create light more efficiently and effectively. However, since mercury is a health hazard and potential soil and water contaminant, it must be handled very carefully by certified facilities.
So how do you recycle a fluorescent light bulb?
To recycle a fluorescent bulb, first the glass has to be crushed. A big part of the process is safely breaking a lot of glass in a designated “breaking box.” The broken glass is then cleaned and ground down into the consistency of sand, This is so the mercury, which may be present as a powder of vapor, can be separated from the glass and safely disposed of. Pipes pull the mercury away from the glass and into a separate container. That leaves the recycler with two main materials left, the ground up glass, and the metal piece at the end of the bulb that used to hook it up to the power supply. This metal is removed from the glass using a magnet so that the ground glass and metal can be dealt with separately.
How does a recycler keep the process safe if there is mercury involved?
For any certified recycler, the safety of their employees, the public and the environment is their #1 priority, enforced by policies and regulations. This is why in lightbulb recycling, they use 6 separate HEPA filters as well as a carbon filter to make sure no mercury or glass dust gets where it isn’t supposed to be in the facility. Furthermore, in facilities that deal with large amounts of mercury, it’s standard that employees and the facility itself undergo mercury testing multiple times a day. Once the mercury is carefully sorted out, it’s put into secure 55 gallon drums and sent to a hazardous waste facility where it can be safely dealt with. They also have a third party analyze their materials for impurities and contamination to make sure they’re good to go before heading back out into the world.
What does the recycler do with the components once they’re recycled?
The powdered glass can then be used to make asphalt reflective to make driving at night safer or in sandblasting, which is a common way of power cleaning some surfaces. The metal end caps can be recycled by a metal recycler. The mercury can be safely reused in new products that require mercury such as thermometers or more fluorescent light bulbs, of course.
We hope this overview has helped shine some light on the fascinating world of recycling for you. After visiting the Clean Earth facility we have a renewed respect and appreciation for the amount of hard work it takes to safely recycle some of our most common household objects like lightbulbs.
