Forty years on, recycling rare earths from lamps is still promised and funded. However, the projects keep evaporating.
Old fluorescent lamps contain more terbium, share for share, than mines. In most rare-earth ore, terbium makes up less than 1 percent of the rare earths. In the white powder that coats the inside of a new fluorescent tube, it is 5 percent. That was what the U.S. Energy Department believed.
Of the rare earths in it, yttrium is most of the weight. Europium and terbium are most of the value.
Lamp makers knew this long before rare earths mania. A patent filed in Germany in 1984, later tied to Osram, the German lamp maker, gave a recipe for getting the powder back. The reasons were that old lamps are hazardous waste, and what is inside them is expensive.
Forty years on, recycling rare earths from lamps is still promised and funded. However, the projects keep evaporating. Solvay’s plant in France was one. You can read about it here. This is another, at a tungsten plant in Pennsylvania.
Solvay already had the separation plant, which is the hardest and the most expensive part of the job. However, it still closed its lamp recycling in under four years, as we showed.
Why not reuse the powder?
You might think the powder could simply be put into new lamps. Osram said as much in 2001, when it promised “high product quality”. By 2006, its patent said the earlier recycling ended in phosphor useless for making lamps, or used only a fraction of the waste.
The patent gives two reasons. Fine glass splinters stay in the powder. And when the red phosphor is pulled out, other elements come down with it and dim the light. The patent calls them killer elements. One of them is terbium.[1][2]
Terbium is the reason lamp powder looked worth recovering. It is also one of the elements that dims the recovered red phosphor. So the powder could not go straight into new lamps. The elements had to be separated first, and separation is the expensive step.
Tungsten
Global Tungsten & Powders, in Towanda, Pennsylvania, was Osram’s powder division. It made tungsten powder and lamp phosphor. In 2008, Osram sold it to Plansee, an Austrian metals group. It was Plansee’s largest purchase ever. Every reason Plansee stated for the purchase was about tungsten. To secure supply and reduce dependence on Chinese suppliers. Phosphor was never mentioned.
Osram’s patents for recovering rare earths from lamps all stopped just before separation. They sent the cleaned material, which they called “synthetic ore”, on to “the standard separation process”. That meant someone else’s plant. Only in 2011 did an Osram patent include the separation step. Osram’s 2011 filing says separation costs about twice all the earlier steps put together.
No document shows Global Tungsten separating single elements, or building the capacity to do it. On one estimate, separation capacity costs more than 30,000 dollars for every tonne a year.
Did they recover anything?
Global Tungsten never published how much lamp powder it took in, or how much rare earth it sold. What we know comes from the reports the plant had to send to the state.
The state of Pennsylvania permitted a rare earth recovery wastewater stream at Towanda through February 2017. The monthly reports show it ran from June 2013 to September 2014. About sixteen months. At its busiest, it averaged about 22,000 gallons a day, some 85,000 litres. That is about 2 percent of the design flow of the plant’s main process outfall. A small side line in a large tungsten plant. [3]
In January 2013, a team of scientists at KU Leuven in Belgium reviewed the efforts to recycle rare earths from lamps. They found none running on a commercial scale. Global Tungsten does not appear in their survey at all, though it had described a pilot plant a year earlier.
Osram’s annual report for the year to September 2013 said Osram recycled rare earths from lamps, with its process and an outside partner. The next year’s report dropped the sentence. That year ended in September 2014, the month Towanda’s water stopped. No document links the two, and the partner is never named.
In 2015, Towanda sent 104.29 tons of “rare earth reclaim waste”, marked mercury and corrosive, to a landfill in New York State. In 22 years of the plant’s waste reports, it is the only entry with the words “rare earth”.
Not economical. Not economical. Not economical. Not economical. Not economical.
Recycling only works if the recovered metal is worth more than it costs to recover. For lamp powder, it never was for long.
Yttrium oxide, the main rare earth in lamp powder · euros a kilogram
The price spike was over before the recycling plants started
Point at a price to see which plants were running that year.
Yttrium oxide in euros a kilogram for 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2013 from the study for the European Parliament, Recovery of Rare Earths from Electronic Wastes, 2015, Table 3; the line joins those four years and says nothing about the years between. The 2016 figure is in dollars, from a 2018 doctoral thesis at Freiberg, on a different series, so it stands apart. Solvay recycled lamp powder from September 2012 until the unit stopped on 30 May 2016. Global Tungsten's dates are those of its rare earth recovery wastewater in the monthly reports to the state of Pennsylvania; they show the line was working, not how much it recovered.
Table view
| Year | Yttrium oxide | Recycling running |
|---|---|---|
| 2007 | 5.6 euros | None |
| 2009 | 11.3 euros | None |
| 2011 | 109.5 euros | None |
| 2013 | 20.1 euros | Solvay, Global Tungsten |
| 2016 | 3.72 dollars, other series | Solvay until May |
A study for the European Parliament in 2015 asked the industry. One firm involved in recycling projects said a business case needed prices at least ten times higher. A large manufacturer already recovering said one and a half times would do. Even at the peak of the 2011 panic, yttrium reached about half of the ten-times bar, and terbium about a quarter.
Then the prices fell. Yttrium oxide went from 109.5 euros a kilo in 2011 to 20.1 in 2013. On another price series, by 2016 it was 38 times cheaper than at the 2011 peak. Osram called the falling prices “favorable for OSRAM”. For a lamp maker buying phosphor, they were.
A German research institute had warned of this in January 2011. Until then, it said, prices had been too low for recycling. The 2011 rise was the first window. And if new mines opened, prices could fall, “thus depriving recycling of its economic basis”. That is what happened.
In 2001, Osram presented at a Bavarian conference that its wet process for cleaning mercury out of lamp powder would only pay from 150 tonnes a year, and about 40 tonnes was available. Its dry process could work on small amounts, but needed heat above 500 degrees. Osram’s later patents said Germany’s lamp powder waste was 250 to 300 tonnes a year. On our sums, at November 2010 prices, the rare earths in it were worth at most about 3 to 4 million dollars a year as pure oxides, before any cost of getting them out. A pilot plant alone costs 5 to 50 million euros, according to a study cited by the European Parliament.
The one German operation in our sources that reported a tonnage was FNE, in Freiberg, working with the local university and the lamp maker Narva. Between 2014 and 2016, it recycled more than 25 tonnes of phosphor waste, scrap from lamp production rather than old lamps. Its process fully recovered the yttrium and europium from the red phosphor, and only part of the other rare earths. It stopped in 2016, after yttrium oxide had fallen from 143 dollars a kilo in 2011 to 3.72. A 2018 doctoral thesis at Freiberg found that by then none of the processes, FNE’s, Osram’s, or Solvay’s, worked economically any more.
The US Energy Department had called rare earth recycling “a low-hanging fruit”. The scientists’ review said the recycling rates hoped for “cannot be regarded as low hanging fruits”.
The emergency
The strongest argument for lamp recycling was safety. China supplied almost all of the rare earths, and in 2010 and 2011 it cut its export quotas.
The pain was real. Phosphor was about half the cost of making a fluorescent lamp, then its price skyrocketed. Philips raised its lamp prices by about 55 percent in 2011 alone. About 550 million fluorescent tubes were sold in the US every year, and most of the powder from used tubes went to landfill.
When the lamp makers asked the US Energy Department for relief, recycling did not help their case. Osram Sylvania, Osram’s American arm, told the regulator that recycling would not yield significant amounts of phosphor “until as late as 2020”. The regulator found “no reasonable certainty of supply from recycling or reclamation”, and gave the makers an exception instead. It hoped the two years would let recycling grow, and the makers agreed to explore it. When the exceptions were reported again in 2014, recycling was not mentioned.
New mines were no answer either. The trade press told lamp buyers in 2011 that Mountain Pass, being revived in California, and Mount Weld, newly opened in Australia, were “likely to have little impact” on the yttrium, terbium and europium used in lamps. Plansee, Global Tungsten’s owner, had bought into Molycorp, the owner of Mountain Pass, to secure its rare earth supply.
In the one real emergency, recycling was not ready, the new mines produced the wrong elements, and the answer was to pay more and wait for China.
Did anyone make it pay?
From an old lamp to terbium oxide · who had each step
Solvay had every step. Global Tungsten stopped before the hardest one.
Point at a box to see where it comes from.
Solvay from our earlier Field Note on its lamp recycling at Saint-Fons and La Rochelle. Global Tungsten from its permit papers and monthly discharge reports to the state of Pennsylvania, its own descriptions of the pilot plant, and Osram's patents. None on record means no document we found shows it; it does not prove it never happened.
Table view
| Step | Solvay | Global Tungsten |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Old lamps | France's collector | A lamp recycler's scrap |
| 2. Extract the powder | Done by recyclers | Done by a recycler |
| 3. Dissolve it | Two new units | A pilot, then 16 months |
| 4. Separate into single rare earth oxides | Already built | None on record |
| 5. Sell it | Back to lamp makers | None on record |
Nothing that could show a return. Osram, Osram Sylvania and Global Tungsten never published what they spent on lamp recovery or how much they earned. The Energy Department’s awards to Osram Sylvania, about 4.7 million dollars, were all for lighting. The only priced lamp recovery projects we found are European, at one to two and a half million euros each.
If all 104.29 tons had been clean phosphor, the rare earth oxide in it, priced as yttrium oxide alone, would have been worth about 0.21 million euros at 2013 prices. At 2016 prices, about 39,000 dollars. Sending it to landfill was the rational choice.
By 2017, Osram had sold its lamp business to Chinese buyers, and rare earths were no longer among its price risks. Gold and copper replaced rare earths. Plansee’s centenary book in 2021 calls Global Tungsten its largest investment up to that time and describes it as tungsten only.
The idea came back anyway. In 2019 another firm got Pennsylvania’s approval to refine lamp powder “for sale or further processing”.
This investigation was published.
Most are not public on my website. I carry out investigations like this one privately, for investors before they commit and for lawyers building a case.
Confidential enquiries can be encrypted.
Notes
[1] This applies to the red phosphor only, yttrium oxide with europium. When it is recovered from the mix, terbium from the green phosphor can come down with it and dim it. Terbium does not spoil the whole powder.
[2] The sentence is Osram’s criticism of earlier recycling methods, in a 2006 patent application written to promote its own process. It is not a test result.
[3] The design flow of 1.125 million gallons a day for Outfall 001 comes from the state’s 2022 permit review; no figure from 2013 or 2014 is on record. Outfall 001 is one of four discharge points at the plant; the other three carry mostly cooling water and stormwater. The comparison shows scale only, not how much rare earth was recovered.
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Turn your phone sideways to read the charts. They are best on a desktop.
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