Just how damaging are disposable batteries to the enviroment?

I hear it all the time "buy rechargeable to save the environment" or "rechargeable keep alkaline outta landfills"

in all honesty, how much damage can batteries in a dump, or simply thrown over a hill side gonna do?

Poisonous chemicals and metals? Plenty. Let's say you only use two per week. That's a pound a year of pretty bad stuff. A steel casing, alkaline (basic) goo, and some metal sandwich for the cathode or anode. Less toxic than lithium cells, but certainly worse than making good batteries.

And don't forget the trash made when you junk gear with alkaleaks!

Plus all the stuff in a disposable battery takes energy to process and refine, and the production processes will themselves result in some waste production, so even if it was entirely benign to throw away a cell after use, there'd still be the various costs of making it in the first place.

And what's with the 'throwing over a hillside'?

On an individual scale, just one person throwing stuff away randomly might not make a huge problem (as long as they knew enough and had enough self-control to avoid throwing really toxic stuff away, or stuff that was otherwise harmful), but if everyone did it, many places would rapidly end up looking like shitholes.
And the chances are, many of the people most likely to just throw stuff away would be insufficiently informed to know, or insufficiently concerned to bother if the stuff they were throwing was actually harmful.

uk_caver said:

And what's with the 'throwing over a hillside'?

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a lot of people here will throw their trash over a hill into the valley. it's nothing un-usual to drive a long the road, pull over for a break at a wide spot, look over the hill, and see mountains of trash bags people have thrown off the cliff. along with mattresses, couches, recliners, refrigerators, microwaves, car tires, biycles, etc.

Hello Frijid,

One way to look at this is to decide if you want to be part of the problem or if you want to set an example for others in an effort to eliminate the problem...

Tom

I don't throw trash over a hillside.
I generally keep it in the floor of the front passenger side the throw it out next time I'm at a service station or near a bin. It's not hard to do.

Ever had battery acid in your clothes? Imagine what it does to the environment and wildlife.



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The first thing that comes to my mind comes from another direction. When people who only use primaries run out a significant percentage of them just jump into the suv or pickup truck and run down to the store to pick up more.

No matter what one thinks of these types of vehicles the energy used running down to the store in one to pick up a couple AA primaries is rarely figured into their cost.

I never run out of cells.

well if there ever was any Karmatic interplay for humans ,beyond them living in thier own creations & destructions. The damge done could be revealed to them in a situation where they no longer had control. Because humans have not figured out how to communicate with most of the other species, we wouldnt hear them crying about how terrible it was that they live in a river of toxins , and eat tainted , and suffer greatly from the powers that be (that being the humans) .

Johneys little genocides, now if johney was "the god" of all the other species, is he a good god or one that all the other species would say "Johney shouldnt let this happen, he doesnt care" :devil:

Because johney is in control of what happens to all the other species, and how they live, mabey johney would want to be the kind of controller, he would hope that one greater then hisself would also be.

Be a good god , use rechargables the other species will sing your praises, instead of wish you dead.

I just took a 4# bag of old NiMH/Alk. batteries and dumped them into their 'battery' disposal bin and was done with them.

I'm sleeping well at nights.

Chris

My understanding is that a lot of primary battery technologies used to contain some small amount of mercury compounds (that increased shelf life.) Most manufacturers seemed to remove the mercury about the same time as some communities started requiring that (alkaline) batteries be recycled because of their "hazardous" nature. The acids/bases in normal batteries are pretty environmentally neutral; easily neutralized by natural materials/events (and mostly gone by the time the battery is dead, anyway.) NiCd batteries had Cadmium, of course, which is pretty nasty.

So the "requirement" that Alkalines be recycled was more-or-less obsolete by the time it existed. :-(

At a higher level, rechargable batteries are environmentally better than non-rechargargables just from a "volume of trash" and
volume of resources consumed to manufacture" point of view, just because using one battery a couple hundred times is better than using a couple hundred batteries.

Frijid said:

a lot of people here will throw their trash over a hill into the valley. it's nothing un-usual to drive a long the road, pull over for a break at a wide spot, look over the hill, and see mountains of trash bags people have thrown off the cliff. along with mattresses, couches, recliners, refrigerators, microwaves, car tires, biycles, etc.

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Where the heck do you live? It much worse here in Puerto Rico than even what you describe and I can't take it. I need to make sure I don't move near where your describing

I'm not familiar with the exact chemicals inside batteries, but if you count how many times you recharge yours and imagine that instead of recharging you just threw them out, this would make a "nice little" pile in about a month, I guess. Then, think it's not just you ... but the bigger part of humanity... and we get a massive poisonous "mountain" of chemistry. We certainly throw out many other dangerous substances, but I tend to trust scientists when it comes to batteries. Since it takes ages to such a simple thing like a piece of paper / wood/ metal to rot and desintegrate fully, imagine what the case with such a complex artificially created substance must be.

It's a pity we have only one place to collect batteries for recycling here. I only learned about it a month or so ago and it's in the other part of the city. I've decided to collect old batteries in a box and have a walk to there when they get more...

Frijid said:

I hear it all the time "buy rechargeable to save the environment" or "rechargeable keep alkaline outta landfills"

in all honesty, how much damage can batteries in a dump, or simply thrown over a hill side gonna do?

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Being environmentally responsible is certainly a good reason to use rechargables, but once you get used to good rechargeables like Eneloops, you will find that using disposables just does not make any sense. I used to go through about 100 AA's a year (flashlights, remotes, Wii remotes and other kids toys, cameras, camera flashes, etc.). Now I have about 16-20AA Eneloops that get rotated and charged. Most are 3+ years old. In almost all my devices they last longer than alkaline AA's. I usually have at least 4 charged and ready to go, but worst case I am < 1 hour from a full set of batteries. I may use 8-10 AA's a year now and usually because I am not at home and realize I need batteries.

Environmentally friendly, better performance, and more convenient ... what more could one ask for.

Semiman

I recall an old segment on a 80's or 90's TV show (possibly Beyond 2000) where they would mix batteries, casing and all, into cement and laid down as pavement. I can't imagine they still do this though ...

Mr Floppy said:

I recall an old segment on a 80's or 90's TV show (possibly Beyond 2000) where they would mix batteries, casing and all, into cement and laid down as pavement. I can't imagine they still do this though ...

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Why not? It's embedded in the cement. Most things are only toxic when they get out, asbestos included.

AnAppleSnail said:

Why not? It's embedded in the cement. Most things are only toxic when they get out, asbestos included.

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Eventually, concrete pavements crack.

AnAppleSnail said:

Why not? It's embedded in the cement

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It's more a case of getting the steel out of the casing rather than dispose of the entire lot. Surely there's value in the steel in Japan.

Been looking for the episode on youtu.be but from what I remember, the normal way they disposed of alkaline batteries was to encase them in concrete and send it off to landfill anyway. They still do in New Zealand unfortunately.

Yeah, what they end up doing with mandatory recycled things is "questionable." We had "battery recycling" containers at work, usually in the "Break Rooms." "terrific", I thought. Concentrating the supposedly toxic waste in the same room with the fridge and microwave, where people store and heat their lunches/etc.
(and then people would throw CFLs in there to be recycled as well. Just what you want mixed in a big container of hard and heavy batteries; fragile glass tubes with mercury!) (OTOH, it was great for dumpster-diving those laptop packs for harvestable cells. All the good stuff in one place, easily accessible!)

If you shake a CFL, you'll often hear a slight rattle. This is the mercury amalgm that vaporizes when hot. The cold CFL doesn't have very 'mobile' mercury, in that you'd have to shatter the bulb, then find and eat the tiny grayish bead to ingest measurable mercury.

Trash is trash no matter how you look at it, sure some is more environmentally unfriendlier then others but we should all do what we can to save the the environment.... 1 cigarette butt out the window is no big deal but a whole bunch of them is terrible and along the same lines 1 cigarette butt is no problem unless it happens to start a fire.....