When faced with properly disposing of over 1,000 fluorescent light bulbs a year, Lake Washington School District (LWSD) has a new tool that saves the environment while saving another kind of green — cash.

Burned-out tubes are placed in the district’s new tool, called a “bulb eater.” Within a matter of seconds, a fluorescent tube light is sucked into a 55-gallon drum and crushed, preventing mercury from escaping into the air while saving (LWSD) the higher cost to send the bulb out for recycling.

In June, LWSD purchased the Aircycle “Bulb Eater,” a lamp-crushing machine that processes, or crushes, spent fluorescent lamps into small fragments while capturing the mercury vapor and dust particulate in the tube.

The contaminated air goes through a three-stage filtering process that captures the mercury vapor but also neutralizes it by converting the vapor to mercuric sulfide, which is non-hazardous. The crushed lamps stay in the sealed drum: once a drum is full, it is returned to Aircycle for final disposal. This environmentally friendly product not only helps LWSD to protect the air quality in schools from the possibility of mercury release from a broken fluorescent bulb, it also helps save the district money.

Before the “Bulb Eater,” the district spent about $2,500 a year to recycle fluorescent bulbs, as required by King County. Now the district will pay between $400 and $800 annually to replace full drums.

The cost of each drum replacement is $400 and each drum can hold up to 800 bulbs before replacement is needed. The machine itself cost the district $3,500 so the product will pay for itself in less than three years – leading to thousands of dollars in savings each year.