Compared with traditional illumination light sources, LED lighting sources are more environmentally friendly and consume less power. In recent years, their usage is increasing year by year. A report pointed out that by 2024, in Taiwan the illumination lighting source market share of LEDs will have the opportunity to exceed 80%. The waste stream of LED lighting sources is increasing year by year. Therefore, the development of appropriate recycling and treatment strategies as well as reuse technologies has become the same goal of international countries. Currently, many countries have legislated that waste LED lighting sources should be recycled as traditional lighting sources, and have established relevant recycling specifications. In Taiwan, The Environmental Protection Agency has also announced that the waste LED lighting sources should be recycled from January 1, 2017, and prepared to first process the waste LEDs from 2018. In Taiwan, there are few companies is currently engaged in recycling of waste LED lighting sources. In addition, because these recycling companies are still beginners in LED-recycling, they still lack of good technique and equipment for sorting of various different plastics, that results in mixture of various different kinds of plastics after waste LEDs were crushing treated. This make it difficult to reuse and apply the recycled plastic of waste LEDs, not to mention that some kinds of waste plastics are difficult to dissolve, resulting that they usually can only be energy recycled as an auxiliary additive into an incinerating fuel. One of the main source of waste plastic is from lampshade components. Based on current recycling method, 50% of the crushed mixtures still have to sort manually, resulting in high processing costs. Those reasons mentioned above decrease the willingness of domestic companies to engage in recycling of waste LED plastics. In order to solve the above problems, this project will focus on developing the recycling technology of plastic lampshade for waste LED light sources. The content of the project will include investigation in waste plastic types and composition of waste LED light sources, analysis of plastic composition, sorting of waste plastic, and technology improvement in separation of lampshade plastic. We have completed the followings in this project (a). Analysis of the plastics types used in LED lighting sources, (b). Analysis of the compositions and characteristics of waste plastic lampshades, (c). Establishment and verification of a prototype mechanism for physical dismantling of plastic lampshades, (d). Trial production of recycled plastic pellets from the waste lampshade, (e). Feasibility assessment of two applications of the recycled pellets. (f). Interviews with eight related manufacturers and collection of their opinions, in order to construct local industrial supply chain etc. Through this research project, we expect to improve the recycling value of domestic LED waste plastic, and to diversify their application domain.

LED lighting source, Waste plastic, Reuse, Lampshade, Recycle