How should I dispose of a fluorescent tube?

[Bob Eager]

It's a global Council policy. Been in all the local papers for months.

There's 4 of us, for a start. And we are assiduous recyclers.

[Tim Streater]

There being no such thing as local news, I don't read local papers. I shall enquire about this.

So are we. You could try squashing the bottles and so on. Don't forget that the cardboard drinks cartons can't be recycled.

[Tim Streater]

Doesn't stop you complaining to your City councillor about it though, does it? That's what they're for.

[andrew]

I thought WEEE regulations required a retailer to take the old tube back. Medlocks certainly take my old tubes back when I buy a new one.

AJH

[The Medway Handyman]

Its all those beer cans & wine bottles :-)

[Tim Streater]

Yeah well the wine bottles go to Tesco and you can squash the beer cans. We also struggle to fill the black bin - typically it goes out once a month.

[Bob Eager]

No beer cans! And I take the wine bottles to the bottle bank, if I have to be in that car park anyway.

[Bob Eager]

You aound like one of their 'retrainers'...!

Even if we didn't do that, it's still a backward step. Many people won't squash bottles, and may use more bags. The cost to the council of the skewed recycling percentage is going to be greater than that of a few bags.

[Bob Eager]

Complained and complained. No response.

[jgharston]

In a previous life, when I used to be responsible for waste collection policy, in a large public meeting I asked the senior waste management officer what householders should do with waste tubes and CFLs and he said (with a bit of a sigh): For the amount and frequency of fluorescent waste a typical household disposes of, they should just be placed in the bin.

If you're chucking out multiple tubes weekly, that's when you need to be worrying about things, but just put it in context.

JGH

[Tim Streater]

Well it depends doesn't it. It could be said that shipping all that empty air around in un-squashed bottles is wasting a lot of society's resources (not to mention your council tax).

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember MM saying something like:

They tend not to, in the hope you won't know.

[dave]

Good Grief - this topic has had 52 replies!

Fire it into the Sun and forget about it.

[<me9]

That's how we disposed of them at work. They must have got a lot tougher in the last x years since I retired. Letting them fall onto a concrete floor was enough to break them into fragments that rolled up.

[John Rumm]

Well to be fair I had not spotted you were the OP. However the point still stands. In many circumstances Adam's advice is about the best you are going to be able to achieve, in the absence of sufficiently local service that will accept and recycle them.

Breaking them safely in the cardboard tube can also be worth doing. The whole lot can then be stuck in a plastic bag for disposal. Much of the danger posed by linea tube lamps is actually from the glass tube which can cause nasty injuries when mishandled. There is a small mercury content, so I would avoid breaking one inside if possible.

[John Rumm]

Many of them sign up for a co-operative WEEE scheme. They pay a proportion of the sale costs to a scheme operator to handle the waste for them. In turn that means they are allowed to direct you you municipal dumps etc rather than handle the waste themselves.

(as with many bits of gold plated EU nonsense, WEEE is a complete dogs breakfast of unworkable legislation in many respects - just think through the implications of a retailer attempting to handling a large influx of wast CFLs etc).

[NT]

If it were financially worth doing there would be one.

They're not. Someone's been reading greenwash.

NT

[Matty F]

I find that the tubes light up quite well when I hold them somewhere in the vicinity of a Van de Graaff generator. 30,000 volts works quite well.

[Matty F]

That's another reason why I am glad I have a bunch of video cameras to catch vandals etc. I always put my bin in front of the best camera. You'd be surprised how many people look in my bin or put stuff in it. One neighbour insisted on putting a large bag of rubbish in my bin so the lid wouldn't close. In theory the rubbish collectors won't pick it up if overfull.

Here she is:

's now been kicked out by her landlord.

[Matty F]

You should get your council to see how the Auckland City Council do rubbish collection. There are no bags. One man in a truck collects the rubbish. We get a 240 litre bin for recycling. Cardboard drink cartons are allowed, and most plastic bottles, and all glass bottles and tins, and newspapers and cardboard boxes are fine, all in the bin together. We get a 120 litre bin for other rubbish.