September/October 1993
Up until recently, disposal of fluorescent light bulbs and fixtures has been a challenge, and recycling a mere fantasy. Thanks to new technology and some innovative recycling programs, the future for these old lights is getting brighter.
BY NANCY L. GAST
Nancy L. Gast is editorial associate of Scrap Processing and Recycling.
Ah, the plight of fluorescent lights!
While they lived, there was no stopping them. For years, they made our lives a little brighter and our electric bills a little lighter, valiantly shining on while other types simply burned out. But once they started to wane, they ceased to be such heroes. Because of their reputedly dangerous insides, the light of our lives became the bane of our existence, shunned by recyclers and others.
Nowadays, their saga doesn't have to end that way, thanks to some knights in shining armor who have, in just the past few years, been able to battle some of the demons that have plagued fluorescents, and save the potentially recyclable scrap that had formerly been overlooked. But first—a little exposition.
Both fluorescent light fixtures and light bulbs have their respective tragic flaws. The problem with fluorescent fixtures—those rectangular contraptions embedded primarily into commercial and industrial ceilings—manufactured prior to the late 1970s is the ballast. It's the part of the light that actually "ignites" it and regulates its electric current, and, in those troublesome older models, contains a capacitor filled with about an ounce of polychlorinated biphenyls, commonly called PCBs—a controversial substance that many regulators have hailed as hazardous in certain amounts and forms. Meanwhile, fluorescent light tubes and bulbs come complete with a different villain altogether: mercury.
Because of these dastards, both ballasts and bulbs have long posed disposal difficulties—difficulties so complicated that recovery and recycling of their components wasn't even a consideration until very recently. But that was then, this is now: Here's how two companies are turning those pesky problems into profit—both for the environment and, they hope, their pockets.
A Ballast From the Past
Today's fluorescent fixtures are more cost- and energy-efficient than ever before, and that's no small feat, considering that they've been hailed and lauded for years as the "greenest" lighting devices around. Consequently, converting to the new fixtures has become all the rage in office buildings, factories, and institutions throughout the United States ; rebates from utilities and technical assistance from the Environmental Protection Agency's Green Lights program haven't hurt the movement.
Still, while this trend looks good on the outside, mass-disposal of older-model fixtures that contain PCBs has introduced a dilemma that, to many, nearly cancels out the benefits of converting. While there's no consensus on the true risks of PCBs, enough regulators have deemed them dangerous that the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) of 1976 prohibits any new the manufacturing, processing, use, or distribution of PCBs. Naturally, since the enactment of TSCA, fluorescent fixture manufacturers have phased the substance out of their ballasts, replacing the PCBs with other dielectric mixtures such as solvents and mineral oil; some newer models even contain "dry" capacitors, in which plastic mixtures and wax replace dielectric fluids altogether.
The switch to PCB-free ballasts certainly eases worries about disposal and recycling of such lighting, but it doesn't affect the tremendous numbers of PCB-containing fixtures that, thanks to their efficient technology, are either still running strong more than two decades later, or just burning out now. How tremendous is tremendous? The Lighting Research Institute (Littleton, Colo.) estimates that there are currently hundreds of millions of existing PCB-containing fluorescent fixture ballasts in the United States alone and many ballast manufacturers place the figure up to the billions.
Those millions or billions of old ballasts add up to a lot of PCBs—and that's the downfall of the fluorescent heroes. TSCA exempts nonleaking, intact PCB-containing capacitors from special disposal requirements, which is fine when you're doing so in a state that doesn't have its own bans on the disposal of such ballasts, and you're only getting rid of lights one-by-one. When it comes to dealing with the thousands of the old fixtures that are being retired daily these days, however, there have been questions about the wisdom of mass-disposal of such ballasts, especially since some federal regulators maintain that disposing of just 16 ballasts at one time would constitute a PCB release subject to Superfund cleanup requirements. Furthermore, in today's environmental age, there's been increased pressure on finding recycling solutions.
Turning a Problem Into a Profit
That's where companies like FulCircle Ballast Recyclers (Bronx, N.Y.) come in. Mitchell Dong, the firm's founder and president, had been involved in selling cogeneration and hydroelectric plants, and had seen first-hand the widespread conversion to new fluorescent fixtures by many of the electric utilities he'd done business with in the past. So he let his customers decide his next venture, which became FulCircle.
"I went back to my old customers," Dong recalls, "and asked them, `What's next? What else can I do for you?'" As it turned out, those corporations were wondering what to do with their old fluorescent fixtures, and Dong and his partner Brin McCagg figured the answer included not only safe handling and disposal of the PCBs, but also recovery of the steel, copper, and aluminum remaining in each fixture after the PCB-containing components of the ballasts were eliminated.
What began as a manual dismantling process by Dong and McCagg has become, in the three years of FulCircle' existence, an entirely automated proprietary processing line that removes the base plates of the ballasts, separates the capacitor and asphalt filling, and takes apart the entire outer transformer—all in what comes out to be five seconds per ballast. Once the capacitors and their surrounding asphalt potting are detached from the ballast, they're safely incinerated at a hazardous waste facility in Deer Park, Texas.
What FulCircle is left with is metal—usually around 2 ½ pounds of steel, and, depending on the ballast's manufacturer, either 8 ounces of copper or 3 ounces of aluminum. After employing a special press to remove the inner steel laminations from the copper or aluminum wiring, the company tests for PCB contamination. If the metals pass, FulCircle cleans and sends them to scrap recyclers for further processing and reclamation. All told, Dong asserts, FulCircle's process recycles more than 80 percent of the ballast, and nothing is landfilled.
In its short life, FulCircle has grown to handle 30 to 50 tons of ballasts each day, drawn from electric utilities, corporations, government entities, office building owners, school systems, electrical contractors, and other generators of relatively large quantities of old fluorescent fixtures. Dong says that as the mania for replacement continues, FulCircle is ready and willing to grow even more—the company already has business offices in a half-dozen cities, and is considering going international—and foresees that similar operations are bound to keep popping up as more states enact stricter PCB legislation.
Taking the Bulb By the Horns
That's all well and good for the ballast problems; alas, there's another scoundrel in this tale of fluorescents besides PCBs. Fluorescent light bulbs are plagued by one of the very items that make them so efficient: mercury.
To many of us, a bulb is a bulb is a bulb, but the incandescent and fluorescent varieties do their work in vastly different ways. Incandescent light bulbs—Thomas Edison's babies—get their gleam from an electric current that heats a coiled metal filament, causing it to glow. But the operative word here is heat, since a lot more warmth than light comes out of the process—90 percent, in fact. Just touch any incandescent, and feel the proof.
Fluorescent bulbs, on the other hand, light up as an effect of the collision of mercury and a purified gas (such as argon) with an electrode within the bulb's glass casing. The electrons (with the argon as catalyst) vaporize the mercury, making it an ionized gas, thus emitting ultraviolet radiation. The radiation causes the phosphors that coat the bulb's glass to glow, while giving off a minimum of heat, since phosphors aren't the heat conductors that metal is. As a result, fluorescents are generally 80-percent light-efficient.
As an added environmental benefit, since a single fluorescent bulb can burn for years at a time, there's no need to buy new bulbs every year, which ultimately reduces waste. But, like ballasts, they all have to go sometime, and therein lies the rub. Or the mercury, to be more exact.
Mercury, of course, has caused many a disposal and recycling headache in recent years, since the substance is considered hazardous to handle. To double the trouble with bulbs, environmental standards in many states prohibit the landfilling of phosphors—usually not a disposal dilemma—that have been tainted with high concentrations of mercury.
Reclaiming mercury isn't a new quandary—it's been done successfully with other products (such as mercuric-oxide batteries). But fluorescent lights and their phosphors presented a new challenge—and, as in the case with ballasts, a recycling opportunity that had been considered mere folly in the past. Thanks to new technology, the bulbs' mercury, glass, and aluminum and brass end caps can all be recovered and recycled.
One in the handful of companies that has taken the recycling plunge is Mercury Technologies International (Hayward, Calif.), which, along with its partner Advanced Environmental Recycling Corp. (Allentown, Pa.), was reportedly the first organization to come up with a recycling solution. (At least two other fluorescent light mercury-recovery plants are currently in operation, and more are under way.)
Paul Abernathy, Mercury Technologies's director of corporate development, says that inspiration for the fluorescent bulb program came about in 1986, when California implemented regulations that mandate that any user discarding more than 25 fluorescent bulbs a day must handle them as hazardous waste.
Abernathy describes his company's system as an air stripping process that separates and filters the phosphors and mercury from the bulb's glass and metallic components as they're broken apart. After stripping and filtration, the mercury is thermally recovered, then distilled from the phosphors for use in new products, such as batteries and thermometers. The approximately 1,500 tons of glass and 180 tons of aluminum and brass per year that are left after the mercury is recovered are then mercury-free and suitable to send to scrap firms for recycling.
Although Mercury Technologies processes approximately 3 million lights a year, and charges a 34-cent dropoff fee for each one, most of its profits from the program have been reinvested in new technology and automation, so business isn't necessarily going great guns—yet. But, with the startup of household hazardous waste collection programs and more dropoff centers for the bulbs, as well as the growing number of light manufacturers who now take back spent bulbs from customers to send to recycling operations, Abernathy predicts that the business will eventually become more lucrative. In the meantime, he stresses, the fact that so many bulbs are being responsibly recovered and kept out of landfills is payment unto itself.
A Bright Future
These tales could be just the beginning of a new happy ending for fluorescent lights. In coming years, there are apt to be more and more disincentives to disposing of them—or even outright bans—and more and more incentives to recycle them.
And while the quantities of scrap recovered from old fluorescents are unlikely to amount to anything approaching the tonnage available from processing old automobiles or utility cable, they nevertheless could be a steady and lucrative source of a variety of valuable materials for those scrap firms that get in on the act—proving, ultimately, that can be darkest just before you turn off the lights. •
Up until recently, disposal of fluorescent light bulbs and fixtures has been a challenge, and recycling a mere fantasy. Thanks to new technology and some innovative recycling programs, the future for these old lights is getting brighter.