COMPLIANCE INFO_PRE 2019 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

0 Universal Waste (Group Question) How many of you just throw away your dead batteries, old TV's or fluorescent lights at home? How many of you do the same thing here? We can no longer do that anymore here at work or at home. These items and many others are now considered universal waste and must be separated from trash to be properly recycled. In the Auto Recycling business we already separate one type of universal waste and ship it off for recycling every day; mercury switches. State and Federal Law prohibits businesses from simply throwing away any items that fall under the universal waste category. All of these items have toxic properties that we don't want getting into the environment, many of them have mercury or lead in them. So what is universal waste? Universal wastes are extremely common, lower risk, hazardous wastes generated by businesses and individuals. In order to promote the proper disposal of them the handling requirements have been relaxed somewhat if certain guidelines are followed. Universal Wastes include but are not limited to the following: 1) Mercury Thermostats 2) Batteries (any type except automotive batteries) 3) Cathode Ray Tubes (TV's and Computer Monitors) 4) Aerosol Cans (Spray paints, bug spray, any spray can) 5) Mercury thermometers 6) Other mercury containing devices (some pressure gauges) 7) Consumer electronic devices (radios, cell phones, computers, game consoles, etc.) 8) Mercury Switches 9) Fluorescent lights What to do with these items? Managing universal waste is very simple actually, the laws were designed to be that way! When we receive a vehicle we pull out all the trash before we continue processing them. It just involves some extra steps. Just like we put the mercury switches in a separate container, we need to sort out the above items and put them in their separately labeled containers. The one thing we need to remember as with mercury switches is that we do not want to break anything. Fluorescent lamps, mercury thermometers, TV's and Monitors all contain extremely hazardous materials and it is much easier to dispose of them if we keep them intact (and much safer!). For fluorescent tubes you can put them in the boxes that they originally came in. Once we start filling a container we have one year to dispose of the contents of that container. Labeling them is easy too. Every container of Universal Waste should have this information on it (or hopefully this label). The following is all that is required: 1) The name or description of the waste. Example: Mixed dry cell batteries or Fluorescent light tubes, etc.