Iranian Researchers Develop Environmentally-Friendly, Safe Method to Dispose Fluorescent Lamps
When products containing mercury are placed in the trash, the mercury doesn't disappear, it finds its way into the environment. That's why mercury-containing products cannot be disposed with regular trash. Mercury products and compounds must be recycled or managed as a hazardous waste.
“The disposal of energy-efficient and fluorescent lamps is done by looking at the recycling of electronic waste such as batteries and mercury sponge, etc., which exist as specific trash among other wastes and can come with risks; therefore, our main activity is on the disposal of fluorescent, energy-efficient mercury-containing lamps and gas-discharge lamps that contain amounts of mercury,” said Mahmoud Alizadeh, the managing director of the knowledge-based company said.
“After these lamps become trash, their disposing process begins, but that has to be done in a controlled way so that the resulting mercury vapors are not released into the environment,” he stressed.
“In the machine that we produced in this company, we have created an isolated space so that the air inside the lamp does not leak out after it is crushed in the machine,” continued Alizadeh.
The managing director of the knowledge-based company went on to say that mercury vapors are released in the machine in a controlled way. “The released vapors enter the filters for which we designed 5 stages of filtration and finally the output of this device does not contain any mercury vapors.”
“The filters that absorb the mercury from the lamps in this machine are placed in packages and disposed of with industrial devices through decontamination mechanisms and finally isolation,” he elaborated more.
“This machine is designed in a way that both the filter and its chamber (tank) can be changed; therefore, this machine can work constantly, provided that if the tank is filled or the filter is saturated, they should be replaced,” Alizadeh continued.
He went on to say that the filter and tank replacement process will be done automatically. “The 5 filters that are used in this machine are manufactured by this company, but in the manufacture of one of the filters, because there were no high-quality materials in Iran, we had to use imported materials.”
“The filtration of this machine has a high efficiency of 90, and nano fibers are used for this purpose,” he further said.
“Glass is one of the outputs of the disposing process of this machine, and after the mercury is completely separated and when it is safe, the rest goes into the powdering process. The powder output has various applications in different fields,” the managing director of the firm continued to say.
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