Veolia is expanding its electronics and lamp recycling capabilities in Canada with a new, 5,000-sq.-ft. recycling facility located in Pickering, Ontario, in the greater Toronto area. While the plant’s primary purpose is to provide lamp-recycling services for customers across Ontario and other Canadian provinces, other electronics and mercury-bearing wastes can also be handled for customers out of this facility as appropriate. Veolia currently provides industrial cleaning and hazardous materials management services from this location.  

Provincial regulations will ban lamps from landfill disposal by 2020. Veolia’s facility is designed to help 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,” Veolia North America president and CEO William J. “Bill” DiCroce said in a statement. “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 has already 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, Wis., facility earned approved processor status in 2013,” Bob Cappadona, president and COO of Veolia North America Environmental Solutions and Services and Industrial Canada, said in a statement. “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 new equipment to crush and separate expired mercury-bearing lamps like compact fluorescents into three components: metal, glass and phosphor powder. Overall, Veolia estimates it will recycle 99 percent of the glass and metal wastes locally. The mercury-bearing phosphor powder will be transported to Veolia’s Port Washington facility for retorting and recycling.

By minimizing the transport of lamps into the United States, Veolia expects to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions from diesel fuel usage by 796 metric tons per year.