A decade ago, LEDs reached 10% of the U.S. lighting market, which was then dominated by incandescent and fluorescent lamps. Today, the technology leads the lighting industry, as energy regulators have set efficiency targets that only LEDs can meet. 

While recycling programs are common for older lighting technologies, demand has yet to drive a similarly strong supply chain for end-of-life LEDs. Now that these solid-state lighting products are the first choice in virtually all lighting sectors, it’s critical to find solutions to capture and reuse the component materials to ensure that they maintain their environmental benefits throughout the entire life cycle.

LED market

In the early 2010s, LED lighting was a promising but expensive technology. An LED cost $10–$15 in 2014, compared to $1–$2 for a traditional incandescent or compact fluorescent model. Performance was still an issue, with flickering and overly cool light color topping the list of complaints. Converting streetlights from high-intensity discharge lamps to LEDs drew concern that the “blue” light upgraded fixtures produced might disrupt sleep patterns.

But within a couple years, driven by a mix of technological innovation, environmental consciousness and policy support, LED lighting took off. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 had set the stage, gradually phasing out inefficient incandescent bulbs. As manufacturers invested heavily in research and production, LED prices plummeted. What once cost $15 soon became a $2 to $5 purchase, making energy efficiency suddenly affordable.

By 2020, LED bulbs owned half the lighting market, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), a big jump from their 2% share just six years earlier. Businesses were the first to make the change on a grand scale, with office buildings and warehouses switching to save energy costs. Performance and controllability improved dramatically, and prices dropped by about 90% between 2010 and 2020, according to U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) figures. This led to rapid residential adoption as homeowners recognized the energy savings simply changing a light bulb could bring.

The numbers told a compelling story. LED bulbs last 25,000 to 50,000 hours, compared to 1,000 hours for traditional models. And they use a quarter of the energy, translating to massive electricity savings. By 2021, LED lighting was saving enough electricity to power 30 million homes annually, according to the EIA. New technologies added more advantages, as developers built on LEDs’ digital capabilities to enable control using smart phone apps and voice assistants. According to Grand View Research figures, 2014’s $6.2 billion LED market grew to $14.5 billion by 2021, with projections suggesting it would reach $26.5 billion by 2027.

End-of-life options

Now questions are beginning to emerge regarding what to do with LEDs when their impressive lifespans come to an end. Recycling traditional incandescent and fluorescent lamps is mainly a matter of recovering glass and metals, with the added need to address mercury contamination with fluorescent products. LED lamps also contain electronics and rare earth elements that are valuable and dangerous to burn or landfill. There’s also the added complication of how to handle entire fixtures with LEDs integrated into their design, a challenge earlier light sources haven’t presented.

Scott Thibodeau, general manager at Veolia North America, Boston, the U.S.-based branch of the international environmental services firm Veolia, said his company is just beginning to see interest in LED recycling. “Veolia is one of the largest lamp recyclers in the United States—we have four facilities that process light bulbs, those are traditionally mercury-containing bulbs that have been around for decades. We have specialized equipment that separates aluminum from glass, and we capture the contaminated mercury phosphor powder.”

Thibodeau sees LED lamps as intrinsically different from the traditional lighting products his company has handled for decades, describing them as electronic waste instead—a category requiring separate handling in about half of U.S. states. 

“They contain a substantial amount of electronic components, upwards of 60 different materials,” he said. “You’re looking at aluminum, copper and the rare earth elements that could be inside. Printed circuit boards also will have some precious metals, but they’re very difficult to get to.”

However, recovering materials from LED lamps is pretty similar to how other lighting technologies are recycled. Essentially, products are shredded, and then various processes are used to attract or draw out specific components from the material. Thibodeau noted that designing these processes becomes even more challenging when working with fixtures that have LEDs integrated into their design.

“The number of LEDs, the structure of the LED, plastic or aluminum housing—they all vary, so it really comes down to the specialized equipment that’s going to be able to separate metal from plastic and use a combination of magnetic, hydrostatic and gravity separation process to get to the end result,” Thibodeau said. “You’re looking at a lack of standardization on integrated fixtures—it’s not waste that, like a computer, you could manually break down by hand.”

Another challenge for recyclers working with LEDs today, Thibodeau added, is the lack of volume needed to justify investment in more efficient and sophisticated separation technologies. 

“I think it will grow as more LEDs enter the market and as more of the first-­generation LEDs are replaced,” he said, noting that this market is growing in parallel to diminishing demand for fluorescent-lamp recycling.

“Mercury-containing lamps—linear fluorescents—are declining anywhere from 15% to 30% annually, in terms of volumes coming into our facilities, and LEDs are growing at similar percentages of materials coming in,” Thibodeau said. “But the overall size of the LEDs coming in is relatively small, probably 5% of the total volume of lamps that we’re currently recycling. I think that market continues to grow at about that percentage, and it’ll be mainly driven by retail and municipal infrastructure upgrades.”

Making recycling easier

DOE, which has supported LED advances and adoption since the technology’s beginnings, is also thinking about end-of-life questions for luminaires. Its L-Prize competition helped lead to the first marketable LED replacement for the 60W incandescent bulb in 2011 (the winner was Philips’ EnduraLED lamp). 

Since 2021, the L-Prize has focused on commercial-sector luminaires in three phases: concept, focused on new innovations for luminaires and lighting systems; prototype, requiring competitors to submit working models demonstrating technological innovation; and manufacturing and installation, with competitors demonstrating an ability to produce and install real products meeting L-Prize technical requirements.

The third phase is now underway, and the competition’s organizing team have highlighted life cycle issues in the point system through which products will be rated. Circular design—the ability of a product’s components to be recycled into something else at the end of its useful life—is a life cycle element competitors must address. Kate Hickcox, an energy and environment research scientist with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), is on this team, and her work has included a focus on circularity in lighting and mechanical and electrical systems.

“From the early stages of development, we were thinking about both how can we think about equity and how can we think about sustainability in the prize, and so circularity came up right away as one of the questions that we should be asking,” Hickcox said. 

While this isn’t currently a widely discussed topic in the United States, it is taking hold in the United Kingdom and Europe. The U.K.’s Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers and its Society of Light and Lighting created a methodology, called TM66, that manufacturers can use to measure how their products fit with circularity principles. Hickcox said it can be helpful for U.S. lighting makers. The document includes a tool that looks at product-design specifics related to circular design.

“You can go through the tool as a manufacturer and ask, ‘Did we glue the LEDs to the board? Did we use paint that is water-
soluble, or would you need to put it in a chemical bath to get the paint off to use the metal?’” Hickcox said, describing the details such an evaluation could help bring to light.

Understanding the impact of end-of-life luminaires in the larger building products waste stream is difficult today, Hickcox said, because they often fall into the hazardous waste category, making it impossible to track them separately. Though PNNL has tried to research LED luminaire life cycles, this fact has stymied that work. 

“We weren’t able to identify a lot of information about what happens at the end of life, which is really critical to us, because in the life cycle assessment world, you need to make certain assumptions about what happens at the end of life so that you can make better choices at the beginning,” she said.

Hickcox hopes to launch a PNNL effort to learn more about the possible costs and benefits of a circular, modular approach to luminaires that enables easier component-­part replacement—and, possibly, a longer useful life as a result. This study also could identify the environmental costs of throwing away entire fixtures because parts aren’t designed to be replaced.

 “If you take these circularity approaches, does it really cost more at the beginning, or could it save the manufacturers money? Will it really end up costing more to the end-user, or could there be a benefit to that in the long term?” Hickcox asked, noting this approach also could end up aiding manufacturers’ bottom lines. “If you design something for disassembly, you are also inherently designing it for assembly—it sometimes can be easier to assemble something that’s easier to disassemble.”

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