Going Green: There are ways to recycle items with mercury

By Jim Bona

It’s that time of the year again when we change our clocks. One of the other things that we link to this change is the invitation from our local firefighters to change the batteries in our smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. (Also not a bad idea to check your home’s method of heating with some pre-season maintenance too.) It doesn’t really matter when during the year you do this, as long as it is done regularly, but linking it to the change of the clocks is a good way to remember.

Along with switching out the batteries comes the invitation to try to get into the habit of recycling those used batteries, rather than tossing them in the garbage. Even if your weekly curbside pickup doesn’t include batteries, you can and should still try to get into the habit of keeping them out of the trash. We can use a lot of batteries these days and it is too easy to just toss them. The good thing about saving them is that they don’t take up much space, so you can get a can or bucket and start to fill it. It will take a good long time to accumulate enough of them to want to find a way to recycle them. There are ways you can do it. The county offers plastic bags to put the batteries to recycle and there are specific spots you can drop them off when you have accumulated a bunch. (If you live close to Hamilton, you can drop batteries to be recycled at the Village Office.) As long as we are talking about keeping mercury and lead out of the landfills, there is now a new opportunity to recycle your cfl’s (compact fluorescent light bulbs) too.

Madison County announced recently that they would be accepting cfl’s for recycling. This is good, because they have mercury in them, which shouldn’t end up in the trash/landfill. The only problem is that you just can’t put them out on curbside for pickup. Cfl’s have to be brought to the local county landfill transfer station at the Buyea Rd. Landfill in the Town of Lincoln. This is an experimental project and it starts on Saturday, December 5 from 7:10 a.m. to 3 pm. The bulbs have to be wrapped up in paper too, and not just dropped in the bin bare. Although this is starting out small, hopefully people will respond, which will allow the project to expand.

Cfl’s are not allowed in the regular waste stream and are potentially highly polluting, due to the amount of mercury they contain, even though it is a relatively very small amount in each bulb. As usage of these bulbs increases, there will be more of them burning out and will all have to be disposed of safely. So hold your batteries and cfl’s and don’t put them in the garbage, please. Even better, use rechargeable batteries, if at all possible.

Going Green: There are ways to recycle items with mercury

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