Recolight, the recycling compliance body for the lighting industry in the UK, is expanding its lamp collection and recycling service by lowering the threshold for businesses to receive a free service.
Set up in response to the EU’s Waste Electrical and Waste Electronic (WEEE) Directive, which puts responsibility for WEEE recycling on the shoulders of producers, Recolight is an Environment Agency approved compliance scheme for ensuring waste lightbulbs and lamps are correctly disposed of.
Recolight used to provide businesses with a free collection service if they collected 1000 Gas Discharge Lamps (GDLs) every three months. Under the expanded service, businesses can now qualify for a free service if they collect 1000 GDLs every 6 months and can also take advantage of a new online booking system. It is hoped that the new service will allow more businesses to take advantage of the free collection service.
Nigel Harvey, Recolight’s Chief Executive, said: “Expanding access to waste lamp recycling is very important to us. By lowering the threshold and allowing more businesses to become collection points, we hope that as many lamps as possible will be recycled.”
Last June, Recolight extended the range of collection options for businesses that did not meet the threshold for a free collection, by offering leases on storage containers that would be collected and recycled for free once full. This meant businesses could then join Recolight’s network of 800 domestic or 300 commercial lightbulb collection points across the UK.
Participation in the scheme is important because ultimately, although lamp producers are responsible for the costs of recycling, they still rely on end users to get the lamps into the recycling stream. This will be particularly important once the new WEEE directives are adopted later this year, and UK recycling targets change from a weight based target of 4kg of WEEE per person, to 45 per cent of all WEEE produced in and imported into the UK.
Since 2007, Recolight has collected and recycled over 125 million fluorescent strip lights, diverting nearly half a tonne of mercury from landfill.
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