Lamp recycler bemoans lack of hazardous waste awareness

This is the belief of the Lamp Recycling Company, based in Basingstoke, which collects fluorescent lamps and currently sends them to Germany for reprocessing.

” It would be fantastic to run a plant in this country, but more people need to be made aware of the hazardous waste regulations.“
– Norman Kemp, Lamp Recycling Company
Managing director Norman Kemp said this week the company would like to be reprocessing lamps in this country, but collection yields do not make such a prospect commercially viable.

Mr Kemp said: “It would be fantastic to run a plant in this country, but more people need to be made aware of the hazardous waste regulations, which will increase yields and make it possible to run a lamp recycling plant.”

“The plant we send the lamps to processes around four million lamps per annum. In this country we only collect 12 million lamps, not just fluorescent, but all types of lamp,” Mr Kemp added.

Regulations
The new regulations in question came into force last month, and newly categorised items like fluorescent lamps, televisions and toner cartridges as “hazardous waste”.

Companies generating more than 200kg of hazardous waste must register their sites with the Environment Agency under the new regime, with the hazardous materials then subject to tight controls on their disposal.

Expanding
The Lamp Recycling Company collects lamps from organisations including waste management companies, local authorities, prisons, offices, universities and factories. It has contacts as far north as Liverpool and Mr Kemp described the company as currently expanding its collections.

On average, the Lamp Recycling Company sends around 60,000 fluorescent lamps at any one time to the Remondis Elektric Recycling plant near Berlin. Mr Kemp said that the company sends around half a million lamps a year for reprocessing there.

The company also has a license to handle CRTs and fridges. “Sometimes if we are making a collection we will also pick up other electronic items. We pass these on to other small businesses, they will often do the same and pass lamps on to us. It makes sense for small businesses to help each other out like that.”