Lighting & Electrical

Mercury Kills Thousands Every Year. The Minamata Convention Is Here To Change That.

In the mid-1950s doctors in the Japanese city of Minamata began to see patients with severe neurological symptoms. Many died a horrible death. Eventually, Minamata disease was found to be the result of mercury poisoning. A nearby chemical plant was pouring a highly toxic form of mercury, methylmercury, into the sea. Methylmercury is bio-magnified – small fish are eaten by bigger fish, and methylmercury levels increase up the food chain until the big fish are eaten by people. Now, nearly 60 ye…

How LEDified Doubles Its Environmental Achievement

Every month LED lighting specialist LEDified replaces around 40,000 halogen lights, fluorescent tubes and high bay lights with low-energy LED lights. It’s important work that contributes significantly to the Victorian Energy Efficiency Target (VEET) and the equivalent Energy Saving Scheme (ESS) in New South Wales. The aim of these schemes is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by making it cheaper for householders and businesses to install energy-saving technology. Verified destruction It’s one…

What Is The Future Of Lighting Waste?

Back when Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison where figuring out how to produce viable light bulbs, dealing with lighting waste wasn’t much of an issue. The light globes might not have lasted all that long, but the contents weren’t particularly nasty, and nobody would have given a second thought to throwing them away. The Mercury Problem Fluorescent tubes and mercury vapour lamps have been around for nearly as long, and many types of fluorescent lighting waste are considered hazardous waste. As a re…

Carelessly disposed of fluorescent light globes are an eventual source of mercury pollution. Image: iStockphoto

Next Time You Throw Away Your Old Light Globes, Think About Where They Could End Up

What happens to your old light globes after they give up the ghost? Well, it all depends on what you do with them. And depending on the type of light globe, what you decide to do is quite important. If you are like most Australians, your old light globes will go into your rubbish bin. For older style incandescent light globes that doesn’t present a significant environmental problem. It’s a bit of a waste of the metal and glass they are made from and it adds to landfill volume, but they don’t …

What If 20 Million Light Globes Didn’t Have To End Up In Landfills Every Year?

In Australia it is estimated that over 20 million mercury-containing light bulbs, lamps and fluorescent tubes end up in landfill each year. There’s a real risk of that mercury leaking out of landfills and entering our environment, and as most of us know, mercury is dangerous stuff. So wouldn’t it be better if it didn’t end up in landfill? It may seem that each light globe doesn’t contain much mercury, but it really adds up. So if there is an easy way to properly dispose of your old compact fl…

SA Power Networks Recycle Lighting With Ecocycle

SA Power Networks, formerly ETSA Utilities, is South Australia’s electricity distributor. Its street lighting is recycled with Ecocycle in Wingfield. Check the links below for more information: http://www.fluorocycle.org.au/cms/files/SA%20Power%20Networks%20Case%20Study.pdf http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/credit-for-fluoro-light-recycling/story-e6frea6u-1226312980244 http://www.ecosmagazine.com/?paper=EC12247 …

How Do We Catch Up To The UK On Lamp Recycling?

If we want to see what is possible when it comes to fluorescent lamp recycling, the UK provides a good example. In 2008 23.2% of their light globes were recycled; last year it was nearly 40%. In Australia, it’s harder to come up with reliable numbers regarding the portion of lamps that are recycled. And many of the available figures don’t differentiate between those that contain mercury and those that don’t. Our best estimate is that around 10% of lamps get recycled, so we have a long way to …

How Recycling Your Computer Protects Your Privacy

Many studies have been conducted into the level of personal information that can be recovered from discarded or second hand computers and memory sticks. One Australian study found that most used memory cards purchased online had not been wiped, and around half contained information that could be used maliciously. Other researches have easily recovered data from dumped computers. Part of the problem stems from the fact that ‘deleting’ a file does not actually remove it from your computer or me…

Recycling Recovers Energy As Well As Materials

We all know that recycling is important because it means we recover valuable resources for reuse. This reduces the need to mine new materials and lowers pressure on the environment. But when things are recycled, it isn’t just the materials that are recovered, but also a lot of the energy that goes into making them. This is usually referred to as embodied energy, and the benefits flow when those recovered materials are turned into new products. Aluminium is a good example. It takes a huge amou…

How To Clean Up Broken Compact Fluorescent Lamps Or Tubes

The Federal Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency recommends the following procedure for dealing with broken compact fluorescent lamps, tubes and other mercury-containing lamps. Whilst the Department states that short term nature of the potential exposure (particularly after effective clean-up of broken CFL material) does not constitute a significant health risk to exposed adults (including pregnant women) or children, following these simple and straightforward clean up and dispo…

How Many Ways Can You Spell “Fluorescent”?

We admit it. Fluorescent is a horrible word to spell. No wonder people shorten it to fluoro or, quite sensibly in our opinion, fluro. Not surprisingly, flourescent and flouro turn up quite a bit, but the easy way to remember that this is wrong is that flour is the white stuff we make cakes and bread with. It doesn't stop there. There is a huge range of other types of lighting, from the halogen downlightrs that are so popular through to modern LEDs. Street lighting is often provided by mercury…

Lighting & Electrical

Categories

Latest News

Sign up for the latest recycling news

Mercury Recovery & Recycling

Information

Latest News