Veolia expands electronics, lamp processing capabilities

The French company Veolia is expanding its electronics and lamp recycling capabilities in Canada with a new, 5,000-square-foot recycling facility in Pickering, Ontario, within the Greater Toronto area. While the plant’s primary purpose is to provide lamp-recycling services for customers across Ontario and other Canadian provinces, it also can handle other electronics and mercury-bearing material.

Veolia currently provides industrial cleaning and hazardous materials management services from this location.

As industries, commercial businesses, communities and residents of Ontario prepare for provincial regulations banning lamps from landfill disposal by 2020, Veolia says its new lamp recycling facility provides a more sustainable, circular economy solution to responsibly manage these wastes within Canada.

“Our investment in this facility represents our commitment to finding better solutions for lighting and electronic waste as well as ways to minimize the impact of waste on our environment,” Boston-based Veolia North America President and CEO William J. “Bill” DiCroce says. “As technology improves, we’re able to break down and reclaim even more materials, especially hazardous materials, and prevent them from entering the waste stream.”

Veolia says it has been supporting the lamp recycling needs of Ontario as an approved processor for the Recycling Council of Ontario’s Take Back the Light program.

“Our Port Washington, Wisconsin, facility earned approved processor status in 2013,” says Bob Cappadona, president and COO of Veolia North America Environmental Solutions and Services and Industrial for Canada. “For the past four years, spent lamps gathered in Ontario have been transported to our recycling facility in Port Washington for disassembly, mercury recycling and glass and metal recovery.”

With the new Pickering facility, spent lamps will be processed in Ontario. Veolia has invested in equipment to crush and separate expired mercury-bearing lamps, including compact fluorescents, into three components: metal, glass and phosphor powder. Ninety-nine percent of the glass and metal will be recycled locally by Veolia. The mercury-bearing phosphor powder will be transported to Veolia’s Port Washington facility for retorting and recycling, the company says.

The positive environmental impact of processing the lamps within Canada is significant, Veolia says. By minimizing the transport of lamps into the United States, the company says it expects to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions from diesel fuel usage by 796 metric tons per year.