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 CleanEarth 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 fluorescent, 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.
[Intro]
Behind me is the Balcan MP 8000, 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 and fed into the Balcan MP 8000...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 the glass dust and bulb components will merge together before we get to the tunnel.
The final input line is for the plastic coated laminated safety bulbs. These have
a thick 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 mercury contaminated glass back
into the conveyor line with all the rest of the shattered light bulbs.
Before we get to the tumbler you might have noticed the large white tube 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 conveyer the bulbs still have
their white phosphorescent coating on the glass. That's the toxic dust we're trying to collect.
All the different kinds of bulbs collect 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 that 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. Toxic 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 now 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 of the dangerous phosphorus mercury dust go? If we follow all the white vacuum tubes that pull
air through the Balcan MP 8000 we come to the hazardous dust collection system. It's a closed
loop 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
of that metal we want to extract acting as the conductor. It's 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 CleanEarth
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. This 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 light bulbs we
throw away, the more mercury ends up in our food chain, especially in fish. Already the
FDA recommends not eating more than 1 can of tuna a week due to the high 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 fluorescent 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 Lowes 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 CleanEarth that 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.