MRT in Light Source Factory, Vac

The European Union is presently developing legislation on waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) that will require all defined electrical equipment, which includes lighting equipment to be recycled at the end of their life-cycle. Under the principle of producers´ responsibility, manufacturers will be responsible for the collection and recycling of lamps from private households at the end of their lives.
These households, as defined in the proposal, include ´all private households as well as commercial, industrial, institutional and other sources, which, because of their nature and quantity, are similar to that from private households´. This proposed legislation is not yet fully developed and will be implemented at member state level by 2005, at the earliest.
GE is involved with the other major lamp manufacturers in Europe in generating actions in individual countries, which will assist in the collection and recycling of end-of-life lamps.
Part of the requirement of this proposed legislation is that mercury has to be removed from the lamps by a treatment process and that a high percentage of the recovered materials (glass, metal, phosphor) have to be reused.
Such requirements require sophisticated lamp processing equipment to recover mercury and separate the lamp constituent materials into their component parts.
In order to facilitate the establishment of the recycling system, GE has already started the introduction of separation at shrinkage level in Vác, Nagykanizsa and Enfield. The MRT system separates the phosphor, metal and glass in linear and compact fluorescent shrinkage. As a result of these new installations, the amount of hazardous waste generated has decreased by 80 %. (Waste generation)