Be sure to not simply throw your bulbs in the garbage this year. As we discussed at the November meeting we will begin to collect all of our members light bulbs for proper recycling. We will collect all of your aqurium and household bulbs at each meeting. If your not sure if your bulb can be recylced please send a pm to KaptKen. He is the recycling guru and has kindly volunteered to run this project for the club. Be sure that the bulb is intact and not broken in any way. Try to wrap the bulb in such a way that it will be protected against breakage when being moved to and from the meeting. When wrapping please choose a recylable material that you have laying around the house such as bubble wrap or newspaper. If you have a special styrofoam inset made for bulbs we will accept that but try to avoid using other forms of styrofoam.
We will have a tally sheet at the January meeting to keep track of the number of bulbs each member brings. We will keep track of the tally throughout the year and reward our most environmentally motivated member at the annual BBQ. Im not sure what the prize will be yet but it will likely be in proportion to the participation levels. If anyone works at a petstore, maintenance company or something similar where bulbs are simply tossed in the garbage and you want to do something about it please send me an email at president@delreefclub.org. Heres to a New Year where we can all reduce our impact on the planet’s health just a little bit! Thank you everyone!
Ideally, try to let people know to keep their original bulb sleeve or packaging. Then it is a simple matter of sliding the used bulb back into the original packaging. Of course, they could use the new replacement bulb packaging to dispose of the old bulb. This prevents accidentally breaking bulbs during recycling and saves them time looking for materials to repackage old bulbs.
And if people don't want to save their old bulb packaging, they can give it to the club for us to use in the future to repackage members bulb recyclables.
Bring us your old, your used, your worn out bulbs and lamps to the meetings for recycling. We would like to collect them to turn into the Hazardous waste collection events. Bring your old, worn out, unbroken T12, T8 , T5 , PC, MH-DE, SE lamps and home spiral compact florescents lamps to the meeting for collection. They all contain some mercury, which as we know ends up in tuna, and other fish, shellfish and squigly things we like to eat.
It messes up the food chain. and we would like to help keep it out of the runoff from landfills, which eventually pollutes the oceans, the source of all our corals, fish and inverts.
So mark your old, dead, worn out lamps as “BAD” with a permanent magic marker, and remember to bring them in to meetings for proper recyling.
What about reptile heat bulbs or night lights? Some sort of special incandescent I believe, but I don’t know exactly.
All those normal old incandescent we replaced in the last couple years with the new CF bulbs… should they just be trashed?
I’m working on getting Armco involved Shawn. I got the boss man to let me have a little recycling container at the shop for bottles and cans and we are recycling card board as well now. Will work on getting their bulbs in this as well, as there are a lot.
Bring your old, worn out, unbroken, MH, PC or Linear bulbs to the meeting for the recycle project. I will have a couple storage totes and boxes to put them in.
Not that many yet. 3 SE MH and a DE, and a couple bundles of T5s and PCs from a couple of the guys. they are out in the garage,. I think somebody made an acutal count at the meeting. I have some to add , for sure when i clean out ther closet. and its near time to replace a bunch of my VHOs , buti have to order some new ones first. A few spiral compacts too that have burned out on me . Not enough yet for a PR event. But what ever it takes.
[quote=“Gordonious, post:5, topic:938”]
What about reptile heat bulbs or night lights? Some sort of special incandescent I believe, but I don’t know exactly. [/quote]
Rather not trash these, but also have never seen “reptile bulbs” on any list. For time being they sit around my house.
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