Greentech Innovations: The Completely Recyclable Light Bulb

Finally, a light bulb that can get rid of without worrying about environmental hazards.

Eden Park Illumination, a University of Illinois spin-out, has created what it calls microplasma lights that will produce 40 lumens of light or more per watt. In these lights, two glass or plastic panels create a sandwich. Inside the sandwich sits an aluminum mesh dotted with microcavities filled with phosphors. When a current is passed through the sandwich, the phospors get excited and light is generated. You’re looking at a prototype in the picture. (Eden Park will present more on its technology at our Greentech Innovations End to End Electricity conference taking place on November 17 and 18 in New York City.

But that’s all that’s in the light—aluminum, phosphors and glass. There’s no mercury.

“Adding mercury would increase the lumen output but the intent is to make it fully recyclable,” said CEO Philip Warner.

Like plasma TVs, plasma lights can be both large and thin. Imagine a wall covered in panels that emanate light. (Effects with color and brightness, depending on what the customer wants, can also be tuned.) LEDs produce more lumens per watt than plasma lights, but you’d need several LEDs in an array to get this kind of wall-of-light effect.

Other companies are trying to make similar lights out of organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) and capacitors, but Warner claims that plasmas will have superior performance and lifetimes. Plasma lights can go for 40,000 hours. Eden will show off its lights at large trade shows next year and come out with lights commercially in 2010.

Universal Display, which will also be at the conference, makes OLED lights and no doubt will beg to differ.

Lighting remains one of the growth sectors for VC investing. Approximately 22 percent of the power consumed in the U.S. goes into lighting and many basic technologies are decades old. Compact fluorescents, which were the last huge innovation, were devised in the 1970s.