Dive Brief:

• A new law in Canada will require the Minister of the Environment and Climate Change to work with interested and relevant people and groups to develop a national strategy for the safe disposal of light bulbs that contain mercury. 
• Bill C-238, or the National Strategy for Safe and Environmentally Sound Disposal of Lamps Containing Mercury Act, calls for identifying best practices for disposal of lamps containing mercury, establishing guidelines for facilities where those disposals happens and a public awareness campaign.
• "Local governments that collect material for recycling and disposal are often left to their own devices to deal with mercury," Executive Director of the Recycling Council of Ontario Jo-Anne St. Godard said in an emailed press release. "The result is a patchwork of regulations, programs, standards, and monitoring strategies. This Act is important and relevant legislation that will lead to greater capture of mercury."

Dive Insight:

Through a program called Take Back the Light, the RCO, which championed Bill C-238, has collected over 19 million bulbs and recovered 70 kilograms of mercury and 4.6 million kilograms of glass. Until this new measure became law, however, there was no national standard for disposing mercury.

Things are a little different in the United States. The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) empowers the Environmental Protection Agency to "control" some hazardous wastes from "cradle-to-grave," but does not create a national guideline for how mercury is handled. Other regulations stipulate how much mercury is safe for a person to be exposed to, and the E.P.A. has recommendations for disposing light bulbs with mercury in them, but there are no federally-mandated procedures.

Recycling in the United States is a $100 billion industry, and some efforts to regulate recycling have faced pushback as recently as February – signaling that future attempts to tell the recycling industry the processes they have to follow, in addition to the outcomes that they must meet (as is current policy) would be opposed in the future.