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The Road to Fluorescent Lamp Recycling: A 10-Step Guide
Hospitals operate all day, every day, year round. Fluorescent lamps can help hospitals significantly reduce their energy consumption. They use one quarter the energy of incandescent lamps and last as much as ten times longer. However, fluorescent lamps contain the toxic element mercury. When broken or improperly disposed of, fluorescent lamps may release mercury into the air, water and soil, and thus pose a threat to human health and the environment. While fluorescent lamps offer tremendous environmental advantages through energy savings, the disposal of used fluorescent lighting raises serious environmental concerns.
Step 1: Assess Your Facility
- • How many fluorescent lamps are in your facility? Where are they located?
- • How often do you change your fluorescent lamps?
- • How many fluorescent lamps are you disposing of each month? Each year?
- • What type of fluorescent lamps are you purchasing? Are they highly energy-efficient lamps?
- • How are you handling and storing the spent lamps?
- • Do all employees know what to do when a fluorescent light bulb burns out or breaks?
- • Are you in compliance with local, state and federal hazardous waste regulations?
Step 2: Develop a Purchasing Plan
Step 3: Select a Recycler
- • Audit your vendor. Make sure their permits, recycling technologies, transportation operations, and bookkeeping practices meet all state and federal regulations as well as fit your lamp recycling needs.
- • Ask about what processes they use to reclaim the mercury and whether they retort (reclaim) the mercury on-site or whether they ship it to another contractor for processing. Some recyclers may charge extra if they ship it off site.
- • Ask about protocol for broken lamps - they are often more expensive to manage and require special handling.
- • Prices vary, depending on quantities and whether transportation is included. Compare prices and call several different recyclers to get price estimates for your facility.
- • Some recyclers also manage other universal wastes such as batteries. Ask the vendors what other services they provide.
Step 4: Establish a Process for Managing Used Lamps
- • Designate an area within your facility to store lamps. Bigger facilities may need more than one location for easier access.
- • Make sure employees know whom to call if they see that a lamp is burned out.
- • Consider relamping areas in bulk. Rather than replacing individual lamps when they fail, relamp entire rooms or floors at the same time. This will permit easier collection and shipping of lamps to a recycling facility. But make sure you’re getting the maximum amount of life from the lamps in the area before you relamp.
Step 5: Safely Handle and Store Spent Lamps

- • Never leave spent lamps unattended or in a compromising position (leaning against a wall or in an area where they can be easily broken).
- • Do not tape lamps together.
- • Store boxes/containers in a dry place.
- • Remember: Lamps contain mercury and are therefore technically still hazardous waste, despite their exemption under the Universal Waste Rule. Follow OSHA regulations.
- • If possible, stack boxes/containers neatly on pallets and shrink-wrap them.
- • Clearly identify containers of used lamps. For example, "used fluorescent lamps for recycling."
- and the accumulation start date. You cannot store the used bulbs for longer than one year.
Step 6: Properly Manage Broken Lamps
- • Keep broken lamps in a secure location away from patents and staff, separate from the intact tubes.
- • Broken tubes can be recycled so DO NOT throw them in the trash.
- • Remember: Broken lamps contain mercury and may present health hazards. Follow OSHA and EPA regulations when managing broken lamps.
Step 7: Get Lamps to the Recycler
Step 8: Educate Employees
Step 9: Record and Track Data
Step 10: Problems? Use the Resources Available to You.
- • Contact H2E for helpful tips: h2e@h2e-online.org, or 1-800-727-4179
- • Use the H2E website, www.h2e-online.org for helpful tips.
- • For more information on the Universal Waste Rule refer to 40 CFR 273 and https://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/hazwaste/id/univwast.htm
- • Use the H2E listserv to find out what other H2E Partners are doing to recycle their fluorescent lamps.
- • Ask your recycling vendor.
- • Ask local, state and federal environmental officials.
- • For accidental releases, use the resources at https://www.epa.gov/epahome/emergenc.htm
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