Reduce your waste by recycling your old globes and electrical equipment
Ensuring you correctly dispose lighting and electrical equipment is important. Some lamps contain harmful substances such as mercury and lead, that if released pose serious risks to human health and the environment. Total Green Recycling can organise convenient collection of your unwanted lighting and electrical materials to avoid them ending up in landfill.
Total Green Recycling can safely recover the mercury found in lamps, while also recycling the glass, phosphor and aluminum to be reused in the manufacture of other products.
Total Green is part of/ support FluroCycle, a national scheme that aims to increase the recycling of mercury filled lights and reduce the impact of mercury on the environment.
Currently around 95% of lamps containing mercury are dumped in landfill around Australia every year. They are the single largest mercury filled product, but thankfully they can be safely recycled to minimise the impact of mercury emissions.
Not all forms of lamps contain toxic substances, but it is still beneficial to correctly dispose of them and recycle where possible. The different types of lamps we recycle are:
- Standard incandescent bulbs & halogen globes – they do not contain mercury but they require significantly more electricity to be generated in order to produce light, making them not very energy efficient.
- Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) – the newest form of energy efficient lights available. They are free of mercury, lead and phosphorus, but when recycled help contribute to lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
- High pressure mercury vapour lamps – a High Intensity Discharge (HID) lamp used for applications such as street lighting are also a type of HID lamp. They contain large quantities of mercury and therefore need to be disposed of safely.
- Metal Halide lamps – a HID lamp that produces light by a gaseous mixture of vapourised mercury and metal halides that could be harmful if not correctly disposed.
- Fluorescent lamps – this includes PLC lamps, Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs) and Fluorescent Tubes. Popular for indoor applications, they generate light through the application of mercury-vapour, using fluorescence to produce light.
If you have lighting equipment to dispose, get in touch with Perth’s lighting and electrical recycling specialists. Call us on (08) 9258 6009 or fill out the form to arrange a speedy collection.