Partners Raymond Graczyk and Robert E. Robert began crushing up fluorescent light tubes for profit nine years ago, and figure they've done away with almost 25 million by now. Along the way, their recycling business has helped hundreds of companies comply with environmental laws and kept an estimated 1,700 pounds of mercury out of the environment.
Partners Raymond Graczyk and Robert E. Robert began crushing up fluorescent light tubes for profit nine years ago, and figure they've done away with almost 25 million by now.
Along the way, their recycling business has helped hundreds of companies comply with environmental laws and kept an estimated 1,700 pounds of mercury out of the environment.
That mercury -- a toxic element linked to brain damage, particularly in children -- otherwise would have gone into the trash and made its way to a landfill or a waste incinerator.
Northeast Lamp Recycling Inc. is the only company in Connecticut certified by the state Department of Environmental Protection to recycle fluorescent lamps, which the law requires all companies and nonprofit organizations to recycle.
Its plant off Route 5 in East Windsor is renovating its offices and expanding the warehouse. Originally run by Graczyk, Robert and a third partner who has retired, it now employs 24 and works two shifts daily.
The privately owned company operates four panel trucks and a pair of tractor-trailers, making collections for about 2,000 customers from Maryland to Maine, including more than 1,300 in Connecticut. Earlier this year, it opened a facility in the Bronx where drivers can consolidate loads picked up around New York City before hauling the spent tubes to East Windsor.
"We're expanding kind of by leaps and bounds, if you will," Robert said during a recent tour of the plant, where glass tubes are pulverized in a machine designed to contain toxic dust and vapors. "We've found kind of a niche," he said.
The company does not release revenue figures, but Graczyk, the company's president, said revenue rose 18 percent last year. He expects that growth rate to continue in 2005.
Already, Northeast Lamp is branching out to recycle certain batteries and computer equipment that contain lead, cadmium and other toxic metals. The partners said so-called "e-wastes" from personal computers and peripheral equipment is an emerging recycling field.
The spent fluorescent lamps, most of them in 4-foot lengths, arrive at the recycling plant in cylindrical cardboard packing cases that hold as many as 170 tubes. At a white machine the size of a small motor home, tubes are fed onto a conveyor that continuously sends them into a rotating chamber, where a rolling steel bar crushes the lamps -- an average of 25,000 a day.
The crushed glass passes over a fine screen that lets the white calcium phosphate coating fall through into a hopper. Vacuum pressure in the hermetically sealed system prevents the escape of any toxic dust, Robert said.
Samples of the pulverized glass are tested weekly by an independent lab to make sure it is mercury-free. "We've never failed," he said.
The recycling venture was touched off by the government's recognition in 1990 that the ubiquitous fluorescent lamps contribute a significant share of the amount of mercury entering the air and water. Researchers say the human health threat comes mainly from mercury that washes into lakes and rivers and makes its way up the food chain to fish that people eat.
A study released this year by the Mount Sinai Hospital Center for Children's Health and the Environment found that as many as 637,000 children are born each year in the United States with blood mercury levels capable of causing brain damage and IQ loss.
Since the mid-1970s, the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act has governed the disposal of hazardous wastes. But Tom Metzner, an environmental analyst in the DEP's waste bureau, said it was not until 1990 that a new testing procedure showed that the tiny amount of mercury used to activate the calcium phosphor coating inside fluorescent light tubes qualified the spent tubes as a hazardous waste.
At the time, Graczyk, who is a licensed electrician, and Patrick Coughlin had a 17-year-old business called Graco Electric Co., selling industrial lighting supplies. Robert, who has a degree in electronic engineering from the University of Hartford, was an employee.
Spotting an emerging opportunity, Graczyk said, they applied in 1994 for a state permit to begin lamp recycling. They got it two years later. They then set up the new corporation and invested $500,000 in the specialized tube-crushing machine.
Their timing, as it turned out, was impeccable.
By 1996, the state had identified mercury as a priority pollutant in its pollution prevention plan and stiffened emission limits for trash-burning incinerators. A statewide network was set up to monitor mercury emissions. Awareness of the mercury hazard was rising. Guidelines even were passed governing the use of mercury in school science labs.
Graczyk said the insurance company then known as Travelers Group Inc. was his firm's first big client. Other big fluorescent light users, such as United Technologies Corp. and Hartford Hospital, soon followed.
"They wanted to do the right thing and comply with the law," he said. Within a year, Northeast Lamp Recycling was hiring employees.
By 2001, the state adopted a new part of the federal hazardous-waste law, known as the Universal Waste Rule, that was designed to encourage the recycling of wastes such as fluorescent tubes. Robert said that for certain wastes categorized as very common or "universal," this eased up on the required paperwork, allowed companies to store wastes longer, and permitted shipment on common carriers instead of requiring specially permitted trucks and drivers, which greatly increase the cost.
In almost a decade, fluorescent light recycling has expanded along with recycling generally. The East Windsor facility is one of 37 lamp recycling plants operating nationwide.
But of the 670 million spent fluorescent lamps discarded last year, only about 23 percent were recycled, says the Association of Lighting and Mercury Recyclers, an industry group that Graczyk helped create.
Businesses, which recycle 29 percent, are doing better than households, which throw away all but 2 percent, the group says. In Connecticut, an estimated 10 million lamps were discarded last year, with about 30 percent recycled, Graczyk said.
Metzner said fluorescent bulbs, which use about a quarter of the energy required by an incandescent bulb for the same amount of light, are currently the best lighting alternative to protect the environment.
From the start, he said, the recycling law has relied mainly on voluntary compliance. Although legal actions have been filed against some companies and fines imposed in serious cases of noncompliance, he said, "We don't have the resources to go to every strip mall and see if they have fluorescent lamps thrown in their dumpster."
DEP officials inspect the larger waste-producing companies to check a variety of things, including whether fluorescent lamps are handled in accordance with the law, Metzner said. But, he added, inspectors seldom stop at office buildings or supermarkets, for instance.
"You have to remember that most of the people who generate fluorescent lamps don't generate any other hazardous waste," he said.
The DEP supports the Northeast Waste Management Officials Association, which does mailings and presentations to educate property managers on recycling requirements.
For Northeast Lamp Recycling, the number of fluorescent tubes escaping recycling means a continued opportunity. Graczyk said lamp recycling has reached about 60 percent in Minnesota, which has passed and enforces stringent recycling laws.
Within a few years, he hopes to install a second crushing machine and train a second four-person crew to run it. Robert said that, in time, the company also wants to bring the "baking process" that extracts elemental mercury from the recovered phosphor powder in-house to save costs.
Although recapturing mercury from fluorescent lamps will remain its mainstay, Northeast Lamp is expanding into the recycling of rechargeable batteries, and is moving to capture its share of a new category known as e-waste. That includes the lead-bearing monitor tubes and other components of discarded personal computers.
A few months back, the company received a state permit to dismantle computer systems and recycle components.
"A 17-inch monitor can have as much as 2 pounds of lead-bearing glass in it." Robert said. "It's a burgeoning marketplace for this particular industry."
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Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
