The Process

What will happen to your used lamps and tubes?

The lamps and tubes are safely broken into steel 205 litre drums using a lamp crusher. This is fitted with a vacuum pump that draws air through a 3-stage filter to capture dust particles and neutralise the potentially harmful mercury vapour. The drums full of broken lamps are then processed through our state of the art lamp recycling plant that further crushes, cleans and separates the different material fractions under vacuum. The separated components consist of clean glass, aluminium end caps, steel clips and mercury-contaminated powder. The mercury is then distilled out of the powder to produce high purity metallic mercury and inert mineral rich clay. Finally the glass, aluminium, steel, mercury and powder are all recycled back to new products.

This process achieves an overall recycling rate of approx. 97%, leaving only harmless amounts of glue, plastic and the small electrodes in the end caps.