Like most organizations, Southern Lamps strives to be environmentally and socially conscious. As a result, we have disposal and recycling procedures in place. Since UV lamps contain mercury, we need to ensure that all lamps that are ready for disposal are handled properly. Mercury is a highly toxic material and must be properly disposed of when the item is removed from use. Whenever possible, disposal and recycling facilities try to extract mercury from reusable materials and distills it reuse in a variety of applications. Non-reusable materials are thermally destroyed.
We use a local company that is equipped and specializes in disposing of and recycling components of various types of lamps like UV, fluorescent, incandescent, halogen, neon, and argon lamps/bulbs and other items like thermometers and thermostats that contain small amounts of mercury and must be handled very carefully. The recycling facility manages almost all aspects of the bulb disposal process in house by operating the very best processing equipment. For example, they use mercury retort ovens to remove mercury from phosphorus powder and triple distillation equipment to recycle mercury back to virgin specification.