About Air Cycle Corporation

Where did it all begin?

Air Cycle Corporation was founded in 1978 and is currently based in the Chicago metropolitan area. Over the years, we have manufactured a variety of products, including "Automatic Air Balance System" control panels for McDonald's restaurants (found in over 3000 locations), electronic lamp ballasts for specialty markets, and advanced coffee dispensing machines.

Through involvement in the lighting industry, Air Cycle identified the need for make packaging spent fluorescent lamps easy and efficient. As legislation was passed to reduce pollution from irresponsible lamp disposal, we designed a machine to meet the lamp recycling needs of facilities worldwide. On March 15, 1999, the Model 55 VRS Bulb Eater® was introduced at the National Plant Engineering Trade Show, at which the Bulb Eater® was named one of the 17 "Show Stoppers" out of over 700 exhibitors!

Based on this initial success and the attention garnered through a front page acknowledgement by the Wall Street Journal, we focused our energies on developing a national network of recycling facilities to service our growing customer base. That network has expanded over the years and currently provides logistics and recycling services for crushed and/or intact lamps, batteries, ballasts, and electronic waste to thousands of facilities nationwide.

In 2006, Air Cycle developed the EasyPak™ prepaid mail-back recycling program and launched LampRecycling.com as an alternative recycling solution for our customers who wanted to recycle lamps and store a minimum amount of lamp, ballast, battery, and electronic waste on-site.

In 2012, Air Cycle began to offer the EnviroPure food waste diversion system and in 2013, we became the worldwide master distributor of the Viking Pure and Rodale Institute CDS™ sanitizing and cleaning systems.