Information on the fate of mercury from fluorescent lamps disposed in landfills. Final report

Technical Report · Wed Mar 01 04:00:00 EST 1995

OSTI ID:61114

Summers, K; Ungs, M; Radde, J ^[1]; Bloom, N ^[2]

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1. Tetra Tech, Inc., Lafayette, CA (United States)
2. Frontier Geosciences, Inc., Seattle, WA (United States)

Under its ``Green Lights`` program, the US EPA has encouraged companies to replace existing lighting fixtures with newer, more energy-efficient bulbs. A potential impediment to increased use of such energy-efficient bulbs, however, is the cost and regulations associated with disposal of the existing bulbs that would be replaced under Green Lights and similar programs. To better evaluate whether such regulations are necessary, the US EPA issued proposed regulations for disposal of mercury-containing lamps and requested information on the potential for mercury to be released to the atmosphere and to the groundwater. This project included an experiment to measure mercury vapor emissions from broken mercury-containing fluorescent lightbulbs and modeling to estimate the potential for impacts on air and groundwater from the disposal of such bulbs at municipal landfills. The flux rates from the experiment were then used to estimate the ambient air concentrations at a landfill. The computed air concentrations at the breathing zone were all low, considerably less than the OSHA limit of 50 {mu}g/m{sup 3}. The predicted air concentrations are still less than 20 {mu}g/m{sup 3} when landfill gas generation is considered, which potentially increases the flux of gases to the surface. Measurements of mercury at actual landfills in the literature also showed low concentrations, and thus are consistent with the above results. Groundwater modeling was also conducted using MYGRT, a two-dimensional solute transport model developed by Tetra Tech for EPRI, to estimate the effect of mercury leaching from bulbs.

• Research Organization: Electric Power Research Inst., Palo Alto, CA (United States); Tetra Tech, Inc., Lafayette, CA (United States); Frontier Geosciences, Inc., Seattle, WA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: Electric Power Research Inst., Palo Alto, CA (United States)
• OSTI ID: 61114
• Report Number(s): EPRI-TR--104953
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
ENERGY EFFICIENCY
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS
ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSPORT
EXPERIMENTAL DATA
FLUORESCENT LAMPS
LIGHTING SYSTEMS
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
MERCURY
WASTE DISPOSAL