Zero Waste Alliance

Northwest Compact Fluorescent Lamp (CFL) Recycling Project

Background
General Information
Meetings
Sponsors
Resources

Background

Compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) have been widely promoted by electric utilities and energy efficiency groups because they produce the same amount of light as standard incandescent bulbs while using up to 75% less energy and lasting up to ten times as long. During the energy crisis of 2001, 6.8 million CFLs were sold in stores and another 1.3 million were given away by electric utilities in Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

Watch the National Geographic video "This Bulb" starring Natalie Portman, Kyra Sedgwick, Chloe Sevigny.

CFLs help reduce the pollution associated with energy production, but because they also contain about 5 mg of mercury per bulb, they may introduce another environmental problem. Mercury is toxic and once released into the environment it can accumulate in living organisms and travel up the food chain where it reaches high concentrations in fish and other marine life. Proper recycling ensures the benefits of CFLs while properly managing the disadvantages.

A group of sponsors that includes Bonneville Power Administration, Clark Public Utility District, Eugene Water and Electric Board, Metro Regional Government, Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance, Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, PacifiCorp, and Portland General Electric, commissioned the Zero Waste Alliance (ZWA) to facilitate a multi-stakeholder group process to design a pilot project to recycle CFLs in Oregon and/or Washington.

The CFL Stakeholders Group met three times over a period of four months and designed a program that will provide households with a convenient way to recycle their burned out CFLs. A recycling program was already operating in Minnesota that let residents leave CFLs at any of hundreds of retail stores in the state. Another program in Indiana accepts tubes at selected Sears stores. The technology already exists to separate the glass, phosphor powder, mercury and other materials in CFLs for recycling, but there is not yet a convenient system for bulb collection in Oregon and the Northwest. This project will create a convenient way for CFL users to deposit their burned out CFLs for recycling and thereby help protect the environment.

UPDATE: Following the pilot project design, CFL recycling pilot programs were started in Lane County, Oregon, and the Puget Sound, Washington. For a news article that summarizes these projects and gives the names of the people involved, click here. For the final report of the successful Lane County project, click here.

It is expected that a permanent CFL recycling system will be put in place after the completion of the pilot projects, and that the program model will be replicable in other parts of the United States.

The expected benefits of this project include:

Convenient recycling method for household CFLs
Increased economic activity from the promotion and recycling of energy efficient products
A replicable model for other states or regions to use when implementing CFL recycling
The reduction of one of the sources of mercury to landfills
Improvement in the environment for human health and ecosystem protection

Details of the stakeholder meetings are below. For more information about this project, please contact Larry Chalfan at the Zero Waste Alliance, One World Trade Center, 121 SW Salmon Street, Suite 210, Portland, Oregon 97204, T: 503-279-9383, F: 503-279-9381, lchalfan@zerowaste.org

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