UALR Recycles Lighting Waste

When most people think about UALR’s recycling initiatives, they think of recycling items in the typical trash stream such as white paper, aluminum cans, and plastic bottles. Blue canisters around campus are the collection points for these items.

Another robust recycling initiative at UALR involves recycling of lighting products that include incandescent lighting, sodium vapor and metal halide street lights, and fluorescent lights. Not only do these lighting products represent a considerable volume of recyclable materials such as glass, phosphors, and metal, they also contain significant amounts of hazardous waste such as mercury and other heavy metals as well as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB’s). Recycling, which requires skill and knowledge of state and federal regulations, is a major component of sustainability initiatives at UALR. Lighting waste recycling saves the University a considerable sum of money, according to UALR Physical Plant Director Dave Millay. In a typical 12-month period, UALR purchases nearly 7,500 light bulbs and ballasts at an annual cost of about $28,500 with a recycling surcharge of an additional $22,200. Recycling lighting wastes and insuring proper handling of associated hazardous waste is such a critical issue that the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) has implemented detailed regulations for recycling the products, and the Arkansas Office of State Procurement has mandated a surcharge on the purchase of lighting products on State contract to assure that waste is recycled properly. UALR’s office of environmental health and safety (EH&S), charged with recycling lighting waste generated on campus, has initiated a campus program that not only satisfies ADEQ’s stringent requirements, but saves approximately $17,600 in the first year. With help from the UALR purchasing department, EH&S Manager Vince Rodgers has designed a lamp waste management program that meets ADEQ’s requirements and has resulted in a waiver of the mandated surcharge on the purchase of lighting products.  While recycling of lighting waste still requires the services of companies certified in processing such waste, having an EPA and ADEQ compliant plan in place allows UALR to take competitive bids on those services. The difference between paying the mandated surcharge on purchases versus the costs of competitively bid recycling services results in considerable savings for UALR.  Ongoing annual savings through this program are estimated to be approximately $21,000. To add additional savings in lighting recycling costs, the EH&S office has implemented an in-house fluorescent bulb crushing process. The University recently purchased a $4,000 high-tech disposer for recycling various sizes of fluorescent bulbs. The machine, which looks like a 55-gallon black plastic trash can, grinds the bulbs in a matter of seconds. “The disposer creates a vacuum inside the canister and sucks the tube into the blades and chews it up, basically like a wood chopper,” said Vince Rodgers, manager of the Physical Plant’s environmental health and safety office. The debris then goes to a blue chamber which acts like a bag on a vacuum cleaner. The three-chamber process takes the one micron-size particulate, puts it through a HEPA filter, reducing the waste to .3 microns, and then takes out mercury vapor and other hazards with a carbon filter.