What happens to 'Recycled' Lightbulbs? - We reclaimed the mercury!

Today we're going to talk about how light bulbs are recycled, turning everyday objects like these into this...liquid mercury. We recycle light bulbs for two reasons. First, because mercury is incredibly toxic to both the environment and humans. And second, this is still incredibly useful stuff. I'm here at a Clean Earth facility in Pennsylvania where light bulbs come in and mercury goes out. There's a surprising amount of bulbs that have mercury inside of them. We have our fluorescent bulbs. We have HIDs. We see these inside of gymnasiums or street lamps. We have halogen bulbs here, compact fluorescents, or even something like this which is a UV lamp. We'll get to the tuna fish here in a second. If you look really closely at this UV lamp, you can see little droplets of mercury down there next to the filament. Coming over here to the other side, we have a few drops at this end as well. Obviously it takes thousands of light bulbs to make that amount of mercury. But as you'll see in a second, we have no shortage of light bulbs to work with. We have a lot to talk about today and a lot to show you. Let's get started. Behind me is the Balkan MP8000, which is where everything starts. The light bulb mercury extractor has three input lines for three different shapes of bulbs. First let's start with the regular tube shaped fluorescent bulbs. A lot of times these are found in office buildings or warehouses. The intact bulbs are placed into a conveyor here, and fed into the Balkan MP8000 – I just like saying the name – where the bulbs are intentionally broken up and crushed into little shards of glass. I'll show you the breaker in a second. The second input line is for the smaller, more regular shaped household bulbs. These are dumped into a different bulb breaker, but all of the glass, dust, and bulb components will merge together before we get to the tumbler. The final input line is for the plastic coated laminated safety bulbs. These have a thick protective layer of plastic that needs to be shredded off before the glass shards and mercury dust can be extracted. A diamond cutter machine called the Raptor spits out the plastic shells and throws the mercury contaminated glass back into the conveyor line with all the rest of the shattered lightbulbs. Before we get to the tumbler, you might have noticed the large white tubes running up to the ceiling away from the machines. These are pulling a vacuum on the machine to capture any air or dust that comes from inside the bulbs. We don't want any of the mercury vapor from these thousands of broken light bulbs escaping into the room. Notice how inside this conveyor the bulbs still have their white phosphorescent coating on the glass. That's the toxic dust we're trying to collect. All of the different kinds of bulbs converge here before the tumblers at this new conveyor belt. With the machine totally off, it's much more quiet in here. This is the initial crusher underneath this metal flap. You can see that the bulbs come in. This spins around with this motor here and breaks the bulbs into the shards of glass we see down there at the bottom, ready to go up the conveyor belt. And now both of these machines are off as well. We can see the tumblers inside of here. The tumbler acts as a giant sifter, both separating the powder, which gets sucked out via vacuum, and polishing the glass as it goes through the system. dust gets sucked up through the white conduit and the polished glass leaves via the conveyor belt. You'll notice that the shards of broken glass leaving the tumbler are now transparent. No more mercury contamination. The glass leaving the tumbler can now be taken and recycled just like normal glass. I've made a video about glass recycling already and you can check it out after this video is over. The aluminum end caps are also spit out here with a magnetic sorter. Astute observers might say that aluminum is not magnetic, and you're correct, but the prongs attached to each end of the light bulb are. And all of this metal can now be taken, melted, and recycled normally. But where did all the dangerous phosphorus mercury dust go? If we follow all the white vacuum tubes that pull air through the Vulcan MP8000, we can come to the Hazardous Dust Collection System. It's a closed-loop sulfur carbon air filtration system that collects the powders in these metal tubs. The phosphors in the phosphor powder are what illuminate and light up inside of the bulb, with the mercury, that metal we want to extract, acting as the conductor. This bin of powder is definitely hazardous waste at this point, and I'm told it has the texture of baby powder, but I'm not going to find out for myself. Now it's time to distill the powdered mercury back into liquid mercury so it can go on and live another life. Now that the bulbs are crushed and the powder is extracted, the mercury purification process happens behind me with these two massive retort ovens. The cool thing about the Clean Earth facility is that they handle more than just light bulbs. If you notice inside of this first furnace, there's quite a lot of other contaminated objects all containing some kind of mercury. Basically things that have come in contact with mercury, like glassware, thermometers, Even contaminated soil needs to go through this oven to have that mercury extracted. The phosphor powder is put in these trays and slid into the oven with the rest of the contaminated materials. The oven heats up to about a thousand degrees Fahrenheit for about 16 hours, which vaporizes any of the mercury that's embedded in these materials. That thousand degrees is hot enough to vaporize the mercury, but not melt any of the containers that are inside. The goal here is to just extract the mercury. The objects are cooked inside of this furnace which turns all the mercury into vapor where we can collect it. And that collection happens around here at the back of the machine. As the retort oven heats up, the mercury vaporizes, comes into this vacuum tube right here, which is actually liquid cool, bringing down the temperature of the mercury and basically distilling it back into a liquid going into this holding tank here. As the mercury condenses around back and pools in this chamber here, the rest of the air passes through a sulfur carbon filtration system. And that filtration system purifies the air so no mercury escapes out into the atmosphere. The tank behind me is full of liquid mercury. You'll notice it has two nozzles on it. Liquid mercury is 13 times more dense or more heavy than water is. little vial of mercury here weighs about as much as a gallon of water even though it takes up much less space. Because of that, it actually sinks in the water allowing us to separate the regular moisture from the mercury. Obviously one reason we recycle mercury is because it's still useful and we shouldn't throw useful things away. The other more important reason is that it's extremely toxic to humans, damaging the nervous system, kidneys, liver, and even the brain. The more lightbulbs we throw away, the more mercury ends up in our food chain, especially in fish. Already the FDA recommends not eating more than one can of tuna a week due to the higher mercury content. So it's pretty important. We should keep mercury out of the landfills and out of the water supply. So if at any point in the future you plan on switching from fluorescents to LEDs and don't want the mercury inside of these bulbs to end up in a landfill or fish or yourself. Some of the easiest places to recycle these bulbs are at places like Lowe's or Home Depot. They have collection points. Or a company called TerraCycle also has mail-in collection for residential and commercial. Let's keep the mercury where it belongs. And there you have it. What really happens to recycled light bulbs? Personally I'm super glad there are companies like Clean Earth who are taking a product we don't need anymore and turning it into something useful. I'll leave a link for them down in the description. Huge thanks to them for letting me come tour this facility. And let me know if you have any questions down in the comments. Thanks a ton for watching, and I'll see you around.