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Approximately 50 million fluorescent tubes and High Intensity Discharge (HID) lamps are sent to landfill each year in Australia. This poses an environmental and health burden for the community because fluorescent lamps contain mercury which is toxic to the human nervous system. It only takes a very small amount of mercury to do enormous environmental damage: for example a few teaspoonfuls of mercury is enough to poison a lake for hundreds of years. For energy and maintenance efficiency reasons Investa relamps buildings on a regular basis, so to compliment our efficiency focus we have a policy of recycling all fluorescent lamps collected as part of that process. We do not have accurate lamp recycling figures at this stage; however for the reporting year (1 April 2005 to 31 March 2006) we can report the following diversions:
* The estimate of tubes/T comes from our service provider Chemsal who estimate 4500-5000 tubes per tonne. 
The recycling process from Investa's end is very simple; we simply place the tubes in a box for collection. Once they leave the building the fluorescent tubes are fed directly into a compact crusher separator machine that separates the glass, aluminium end caps and the phosphor powder. The machine captures the phosphor powder containing 80 percent of the mercury as well as the vapour that accounts for the other 20 percent. Up to 99.9 percent of the recovered mercury can be reused for other purposes and the process reclaims 100 percent of the glass, aluminium and other metals for reuse as well. |
