The Explosive Problem of 'Zombie' Batteries (bbc.com) 120
AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: The Environmental Services Association (ESA), which represents waste firms like Biffa, Veolia and Suez, says too many batteries are going into either recycling bins or black rubbish bags, where they are easily damaged by sorting equipment and start to burn -- so-called "zombie" batteries. The ESA has launched a campaign called Take Charge which encourages people to dispose of batteries properly. "Unfortunately, the majority of batteries thrown away in the UK at the moment are not put in the proper recycling bins. Fires caused by carelessly discarded zombie batteries endanger lives, cause millions of pounds of damage and disrupt waste services," says Jacob Hayler, executive director of ESA.
Lithium-ion batteries, which power mobile phones, tablets and toothbrushes, can be extremely volatile if damaged. CCTV footage taken at several recycling centers shows explosions sending flames and debris shooting across sorting areas. And those sorts of batteries are a growing menace. Between April 2019 and March 2020, lithium-ion batteries were suspected to have caused around 250 fires at waste facilities. That is 38% of all fires, up from 25% compared to the previous year, according to the latest data from ESA. In many cases the precise cause of a fire is never established but ESA says it is likely that lithium-ion batteries account for an even bigger proportion of fires.
Lithium-ion batteries, which power mobile phones, tablets and toothbrushes, can be extremely volatile if damaged. CCTV footage taken at several recycling centers shows explosions sending flames and debris shooting across sorting areas. And those sorts of batteries are a growing menace. Between April 2019 and March 2020, lithium-ion batteries were suspected to have caused around 250 fires at waste facilities. That is 38% of all fires, up from 25% compared to the previous year, according to the latest data from ESA. In many cases the precise cause of a fire is never established but ESA says it is likely that lithium-ion batteries account for an even bigger proportion of fires.
don't bin that shit (Score:2)
Re:don't bin that shit (Score:5, Interesting)
Where I live, city with > 1M population, there's nowhere you can return these. I know you shouldn't bin them, but there's literally no other option for disposal other than binning them, unless I want to drive to the other end of the city (about a two hour round trip) to an industrial area that takes bulk waste and drop off a single cell there.
It's easy enough to say "don't bin these", but when there are no other options available there's not much you can do.
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Re:don't bin that shit (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, so that people could remove the battery and sort it separately, if the device is to be thrown away or sent to an electronics recycler?
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Removable battery compartments are difficult to design. One of the most recent designs by Apple was the battery compartment in the Newton, which was a clusterfuck. I doubt there are any Newtons outside a museum with an unbroken battery compartment. It's far cheaper and easier to seal the thing in, especially for companies without good design teams.
Re:don't bin that shit (Score:5, Insightful)
As for selling phones with non-removable batteries, I suggest a mandatory life sentence for each and every phone sold. In the case of corporates, this should mean for each and every director. And the court should have the option of hard labour for any director who wriggles.
I look forward to Apple directors receiving 999,000,000 life sentences with hard labour - each.
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s/director/shareholder (direct or indirect)/
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There are a significant number of phones with removable batteries [productchart.com]. If the feature were more in demand, manufacturers would respond.
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There are a significant number of phones with removable batteries [productchart.com]. If the feature were more in demand, manufacturers would respond.
Filter that list by devices that were released in the past two years. They're all obscure models that aren't sold through a carrier.
The problem with this mindset is that companies aren't doing A/B testing in sales. Make an iPhone 12 as-is for $X, and one with a removable battery and a headphone jack for $1.2X and see whether people are willing to pay a premium for these things...that would be the way for the market to decide. Apple isn't doing this, so the question then becomes what people are willing to to
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Removable battery compartments are difficult to design.
No, they are not.
One of the most recent designs by Apple was the battery compartment in the Newton, which was a clusterfuck.
I have an LG V20 from 2016 with a snap off back that would like to have a word with you. Removable battery compartments have been in devices since battery operated devices were invented, and until recently Apple phone's backs were held on with a few screws. This bull shit about them needing to be sealed for water or dust proofing is just that -- bull shit. Screws and a rubber gasket will do just fine with waterproofing, as will a snap on cover with a rubber gasket.
It's far cheaper and easier to seal the thing in, especially for companies without good design teams.
It's even cheaper to mak
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Something that is difficult to design is NOT the customer's problem! This is a problem for manufacturer's the figure out. Eliminating removable batteries is a much larger problem in itself, and it encourages throwing away the device and battery together and enforces planned obsolescence. Consumers should look out for their own interests and stop being advocates for bad manufacturing decisions.
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or not burden the customer from removing the battery and "sort it separately" but only require that the entire device be recycled, as is done currently
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by companies that wanted to kill the 3rd-party battery market?
You miss the point; non-removable batteries are for killing the 1st-party product.
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Salt bath. This will discharge the battery slowly all the way down to 0V, which will make the battery largely inert.
I don't think you can get down to 0 V; the electrochemical reactions at the electrodes in contact with the salt solution require a certain minimum voltage to keep running. But you can probably discharge a LiPo battery to a safe level.
You may produce small amounts of chlorine and larger amounts of hydrogen and oxygen. You can get a few liters of hydrogen and oxygen from a phone battery that could be dangerous in a small confined space like a closet (4% hydrogen in air is explosive). And the copper from the b
30,000 recycling locations at www.call2recylce.org (Score:3)
Check this web site for places to drop off batteries for recycling:
https://www.call2recycle.org/l... [call2recycle.org]
Where I live, there are 22 locations within 10 miles.
I'm in Texas.
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Doing some quick arithmetic, the US has 300 million people and at least 30,000 places to recycle batteries, so that's at least one recycling drop-off for every 10,000 people.
An American of 1 million people will therefore have about 100 different places to drop off batteries for recycling. (Plus more that aren't listed in the site - pretty much any place that sells battery powered devices - phones, tools, etc.)
If in fact there isn't at least 3 recycling places within 15 miles of you, I'd be very curious wer
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You sell, you take it back. (Score:3)
Where I live, city with > 1M population, there's nowhere you can return these.
(Side note: out of cursiosity, which country is this ?)
In several region of Europe this was solved by requiring the shops who sell electronic to also accept and recycle old similar electronic.
So if your old smartphone dies, but you don't have the level of expertise (and hot air to melt the glue and/or screw drivers with tips in the shape of 5 pointed stars, etc.) to dismantle the battery and process it, you can simply return the smartphone to any nearby electronic shop, and they *have* to take it back (the
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Call2Recycle has an interactive map to find places [call2recycle.org]
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Poke the city council. Poke your employer also (we have a spot to dispose of batteries at work, and not just in buildings that use a lot of batteries for our own products). Poke your legislators.
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Interesting indeed, as you have been modded.
In my city of less than 200,000 I know exactly where the recycling center is as I am constantly reminded to take stuff to it. It's tempting just to toss old batteries- nobody would notice and I'll probably be dead before the environmental damage from my batteries becomes an issue.
And while I could get away with throwing the batteries in the trash, they would definitely fine me if I tried to throw away my broken TVs and monitors. I think I can give them my batter
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There's a little trash can logo with a slash through it. It means "don't bin this shit".
Unfortunately, this relies on people thinking that the rule applies to them. The problem is with the kind of people that throw empty drink cans out of the window while driving out in the country, or leave their rubbish on the train instead of taking it with them, and so on. Even if most people follow the rules, just a minority of lazy and selfish people can cause trouble.
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You think the average person has enough reading comprehension or insight to accomplish this?
And Boeing ... (Score:2)
... thinks such batteries are good for embedding deep inside their Dreamliners! The idiots.
Re:And Boeing ... (Score:4, Funny)
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Not intentionally, anyway.
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Everyone knows that that chemistry is prone to self destruction, particularly igniting - almost on a whim. No recycling plant chewing on the aircraft is needed for one of 'em to ignite.
It's another "Hindenburg" design choice.
Idiots.
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... thinks such batteries are good for embedding deep inside their Dreamliners! The idiots.
I design battery-powered wireless fire alarms. One of our competitors used a lithium battery, which made their product smaller than ours, which uses alkaline batteries. There was an accident with the competitor's product, and the exploding lithium battery started a fire. This caused much chortling in our Sales department. Of course, you should not laugh about accidents like that, but no one was hurt and not too much damage was done.
A more serious point is whether less energy dense batteries, such as alkali
Re: And Boeing ... (Score:2)
Usually they leak caustic electrolyte. Never seen an alkaline burn though.
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I designed a sealed battery pack using four AA alkaline cells in a copper tube. The automated assembly machine went wrong, and one of the cells broke. The pack got boiling hot, and the operator threw the tube out of the factory door. There was no explosion. The operator was wearing gloves, so no harm done. After that experience, I got wary of assuming alkaline cells are safe in respect to fire hazards. But as you say, the main risk from alkaline battery abuse appears to be electrolyte leakage, not actual fi
Recyclers are predatory (Score:3)
All these government mandates that require sorting are requiring you to work as a sorter for the recycler for free, and this is not an efficient method in general of getting the garbage sorted, but it IS highly efficient for the for-profit business.
Why dont they pay someone to sort the garbage? Because they got the government to get you to do it.
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I thought the problem was that recycling wasn't turning into the profit center that was going to be. I thought it was turning out that it really isn't economic to recycle a lot of materials, like plastics and glass; with aluminum being profitable, and steel and paper maybe breaking even. So the real problem is government-mandated recycling in the first place; and if we reduced the government mandates in the process, then recyclers would pay (you) for what's actually valuable, and sortation would happen au
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If you want to recycle things properly - disassemble stuff and sort materials out to maximize recover - it becomes extremely labor-intensive and unprofitable.
Think disassembling, say, a pair of those awful Airpods earbuds: it would take someone quite a lot of careful disassembly just to get to the small batteries inside them. And then some more to extract the miniature PCBs. All that work to recover a few grams of lithium and a few micrograms of gold.
Glass or aluminum are profitable because the recycled pro
Re: Recyclers are predatory (Score:4, Informative)
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A second reason aluminum is profitable is because it's very energy intensive to make new aluminum from raw materials.
Mod parent up. Al is one of the very few things (possibly the only thing some of the time) that is profitable to recycle due to its high energy extraction requirements.
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Sorting from the source (at least coarsely) is significantly more effective
That has been proving woefully incorrect and many governments are realising this. Only recently we've been told (European country here) to throw all plastic and metal in the garbage and all plastic and metal recycling bins have been removed from the city. End result, recycling went from 15% to 75% thanks to bulk automated sorting facilities.
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Indeed which is why paper and glass still have separate bins. But my point was addressing the source separation side. It sounds good on paper but participation is woeful. Anything we can do to stop relying on slack humans needing to put effort into recycling is a win.
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For reasons I do not quite understand, many battery chemicals are too expensive to recycle, in the sense that selling the recovered chemicals does not pay for the cost of their recovery. What I read about recycling old alkaline batteries is that only the steel casing is worth recovering, because the other chemicals, such as manganese, are cheaper to extract from ores.
One exception to this is lead-acid battery recycling. As far as I know, the lead is economically recoverable, which keeps this potentially haz
Re: Recyclers are predatory (Score:2)
There are lots of kinds of lead acid batteries, the ones that are easy to recycle are flooded cell types like in a car. The liquid, water-based electrolyte makes it easy. Every part of those batteries is reused. The vast majority are made with mostly recycled components.
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They couldn't safely sort garbage until recently. It's dangerous for humans to do, lots of hazards, sharp objects, used sanitary products carrying disease etc. There is also a huge amount of it. And even if they did manually sort it that's only half the problem - it needs cleaning too. If you put cardboard or plastic bottles in a separate bin they will be reasonably clean in most cases, not covered in other waste that needs separating before recycling is possible.
Technology for sorting and cleaning waste is
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In my part of the UK we get a single bin for all recyclables (paper, card, glass, metal, plastic). So clearly the government recycling mandate doesn't *require* me to work as a sorter; it depends on the local arrangements.
Money wasted (Score:2)
I bet someone can come up with some BRAND(tm) of buying dead batteries that use some streamlined process to extract the valuable metals out of it like cobalt and lithium and sell to the battery manufacturers.
I've Never Seen A Battery Recycle Bin. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anywhere. Ever.
I toss them in the trash since that is the only option here is Amerika.
Re:I've Never Seen A Battery Recycle Bin. (Score:5, Informative)
The big home improvement warehouses, Lowe's and Home Depot both have recycling bins for rechargeable batteries (Li-Ion, NiMH, NiCad, smallish Sealed Lead Acid) in my part of the country (central Texas).
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Never noticed them before, not that I was looking. Next time I go to the big city I will ask about them. I've kinda felt guilty but when there is no option but the trash you take it.
I live in west Texas in a super podunk town with no box stores or anything other than a gas station and a Subway.
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so living in a "super podunk town" entitles you to speak for "Amerika"? Make an ignorant statement, get corrected, then make excuses. How about learning something instead?
"I've kinda felt guilty but when there is no option but the trash you take it."
Kinda different than "I toss them in the trash since that is the only option here is Amerika" huh?
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Make an ignorant statement, get corrected, then make excuses.
The GP had a very real problem. If he hasn't seen a battery recycling bin I'm sure he's not alone. Pull your head out of your arse and realise this is an "Amerika" problem if people like the GP actually exist.
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Yeah, that's a very good question. Considering that the NiCad and SLA batteries they accept are hazardous waste and the recyclers would get in trouble for just dumping them I would think that these battery recycling programs utilized by the big home improvement chains are legitimate. Maybe the Li-Ion and NiMH go to the landfills but then I don't think the stores would bother with the bins, maybe.
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I have not checked recently, but my local supermarket had a battery disposal bin at one time. This is in Birmingham, England. There is also recycling facility for lead-acid batteries a few miles from me.
I suspect that simply piling dead (zombie) batteries into boxes is a potential fire hazard these days, because the cells can short out against each other. Maybe it is just not safe any more, because modern batteries have such high energy density and current delivery.
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In the EU any shop that sells batteries or battery powered devices must accept any and all batteries for recycling. It's handy to be able to take your old batteries to the supermarket and dump them in the bin, although I've been trying to switch to rechargable cells so I do that less often.
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This is a tiresome argument. There are plenty of options for disposing of old batteries and electronics, if you do even a small amount of legwork.
As others have pointed out, all Lowes and Home Depot stores in the US have collection bins for old batteries - and CFL bulbs, too. More generally, there's call2recycle.com [call2recycle.org].
And if all else fails, you can use the Big Green Box [biggreenbox.com] to gather all your e-waste - probably your neighbors', too - and send it away
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City (Score:2)
My city's recycling center takes rechargeable batteries. Alkaline batteries you can just throw away, as they really aren't worth recycling, and don't have mercury in them anymore.
More of a problem (Score:2)
Every year we get better and more batteries, so this problem is going to get a lot worse. And batteries have to be high energy, so even if they do not have acid in them, they will always be a fire danger.
But it is worth it for the major new products they make possible.
What about non-replaceable batteries? (Score:3)
Without special tools, it's rather hard to get the battery out of some devices. So the most viable disposal method is "whole thing".
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Electronics recycling.
There's a logo that shows a garbage bin with a circle and slash through it, meaning "do not throw away".
You're supposed to bring the entire thing to an electronics recycler. Many offices have an electronics recycling bin, but big box stores like Best Buy often have them as well. Depending on the recycler, they may take replaceable batteries as well. But de
Re:What about non-replaceable batteries? (Score:4, Interesting)
It should be mandatory that devices with a battery can have that battery changed by the user with only commonly available tools.
Manufacturers will moan, especially when it comes to waterproof devices, so they could be offered an alternative of providing low cost battery replacements and recycling, say at a maximum of 10 Euro with a minimum of 10 years service from the date of withdrawal from the market.
Deposit? (Score:2)
Not sure if it's still done, but I remember in some states you paid a refundable deposit on bottles and cans when you bought products that came in them. It wasn't much but it was supposed to inspire people to recycle them - or - various other people, poor, homeless, etc., would collect them and get a bit of cash.
I'm not touting this, it might not be a good idea for many reasons, but maybe a decent deposit on Li-Ion batteries would help.
Yes, huge numbers of them are out there now, but maybe money could be p
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Technological Fixes? (Score:2)
Envision a time when there is widespread use of high energy batteries because they are so darn useful, and yet they do not cause widespread problems.
Such a time will have introduced and internalized mechanisms (social, technical, economic, etc.) that lead to efficient collection of old batteries. Very likely this would include required design features to assist in tracking the batteries, or even mechanisms to render them inert.
There are many possibilities for required design elements to make detection easie
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For "render safe" techniques build-in a resistive discharge component that can be activated after discarding causing them to self-discharge at a safe rate and then become non-chargeable.
It's probably a lithium primary battery rather than a rechargable Li-Ion battery, but our newest smoke alarm, which has a sealed-in lithium battery, has a "permanently deactivate" feature which is meant to be used after 10 years, when it will start beeping an end-of-life warning. Among other things, it discharges the battery.
The problem with recycling (Score:2)
The problem with recycling is simple.
There is no easy way to dispose of ' special ' materials that shouldn't go into the common trash bin.
I can only relate to the issue where I live, but trying to dispose of certain types of light bulbs, batteries, used oil and paints is a major pain in the ass.
The trash / refuse companies won't pick them up and they tend to accumulate in the garage or storage building for years.
Once a year the local recycle center will take them, but you have to drive to a designated facil
Beryllium oxide (Score:3)
I have 'inherited' a bunch of old microwave ovens. Because people know I like to salvage the transformers for various projects. After a while, I had accumulated several ovens sans transformers plus a bunch of magnetrons. The magnetrons have beryllium oxide insulators, which is nasty carcinogenic stuff if broken and inhaled. So I take them down to the local appliance/electronics recycling place. Down the street from a general purpose metal scrap yard. The guy says "Sure, we'll take the old ovens." Then I ask
First step is to make every battery removable. (Score:2)
Don't blame the consumer, blame the manufacturers.
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I designed a radio control keyfob some time ago. The customer decided on a non-replaceable battery. This made it possible to make the plastic case smaller, so it would fit on a typical key ring. The end-of-life disposal problem is then that some cheap electronics and a small plastic case are being thrown away along with the dead battery. This looked pretty fair to me, bearing in mind the environmental costs of a more complex battery compartment and reliable contacts, instead of just soldering in the battery
All shops and gas stations as the return points (Score:5, Insightful)
In our country (Estonia), ALL shops that sell new batteries MUST take the old ones back, free of charge. This includes gas stations. They have a box with special marking, you put your used stuff in it and that's it. No need to drive anywhere, plan ahead or search for a special facility.
As a result, I have not thrown away an used battery in years.
We also have a well-functioning deposit system for all bottles, both glass and plastic. Works like a charm. Everybody pays a surcharge (10 eurocents) per bottle when purchasing a drink, and gets it back when returning the bottle. All bottles have machine-readable code on them all major shops have bottle-return robot stations. The economy ensures that there is always someone who needs those 10 cents. There are virtually NO trashed bottles to be found anywhere.
same in Sweden (Score:3)
Yes, same here in Sweden, you are supposed to be able to return old batteries and electronics to the shop that sells the stuff. Plus, many gas stations have an "environmental container" where you can return paint leftovers, batteries, old fluorescent tubes and other environmentally hazardous stuff.
The city (200.000 pop) has a several recycling centres that accept the above plus many other categories, like wood, electronics, garden waste, drywall, furniture for recycling ... Many are open even on sundays. An
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We also have a well-functioning deposit system for all bottles, both glass and plastic. Works like a charm.
I have often wondered what happened to the deposit system for bottles in the UK. What was wrong with it? Why was it abandoned? My empty cider bottles just go in the trash now. They might be recycled, but I suspect not.
I am not that poor that I need the income from returning bottles to get the deposit back. But I would definitely feel a non-monetary benefit from knowing that stuff with a useful life is being re-used after I have finished with it.
I am interested in how all this recycling is financed in Estoni
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You pay extra when buying any bottled goods, and you get the deposit back when returning the bottle.
I am sure there also government subsidies involved somehow.
There are also social factors in play:
- Returning & recycling has become a social norm.
- Workplaces, public events etc all recollect bottles into special containers.
- The 10 cents may not be enough for _you_ to return the bottle, but they are for someone else. Discard a bottle and someone will pick it off.
Sweden and other Nordic countries have mor
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Have you ever been to the natural hiking trails in Sweden? They are clean of any waste.
Litter in the UK is a sick joke. I walk along the pavement to the shops, and see encrustations of spent chewing gum that have probably been there for decades. And dog poo, so I have to look down all the time to avoid treading in it. I am not by nature a tidy person, but I do not take a shit on my living room carpet.
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What about the non-removable lithium-ion batteries that are found in laptops, tablets, phones, and increasingly in smaller electronic devices like wireless earbuds, wireless game controllers, etc? Those built-in batteries are the problem cited in TFA, not the regular alkaline batteries you buy at the store.
Very few stores sell separa
same in France (Score:2)
Re:All shops and gas stations as the return points (Score:5, Funny)
There is a such thing as waste too toxic to recycle. It's hazardous to human health and tends to lead to environmental disasters.
-Disclaimer: American (US)
Non-removable batteries? (Score:5, Insightful)
IKEA Battery recycling (Score:2)
In some countries (not US) IKEA used to accept used batteries for recycling and give you one new IKEA AA battery for every 6 you were bringing in ( actually one 10x pack of ALKALISK LR6 for every 60 batteries )
The Paradox of un-removable batteries (Score:3)
Manufacturers decided that removable batteries make it too easy to keep old stuff alive, so they seal them in.
This leaves the consumer with a brick which MIGHT still have secrets on it.
This forces the consumer to keep it as far away from recyclers, or anyone else who might be able to retrieve those secrets as possible.
Thus, it ends up in a pile somewhere, or gets secretly tossed along with the cat litter, etc.
Apple and its kin are directly responsible for this mess.
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Why is Apple responsible? They make it super easy to wipe a phone to clear off its data, and they have a supported lifespan that is almost twice as long as all of their competitors. They also recycle their phones for absolutely nothing.
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Because they were the ones that started this whole trend of sealed in batteries with the original iPod? And of course they are more than happy to take back older iPhones, if only to keep them off of the used market.
Besides, how are you supposed to wipe a phone when the sealed in battery has failed and it won't even turn on?
Better there than here (Score:2)
sort trash? (Score:1)
Not convenient (Score:2)
EV Car batteres (Score:1)
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A bit difficult to toss those EV batteries into the trash bin, don't you think? Just like all those pesky engine blocks littering the streets...
In the USA... (Score:2)
....batteries have been 'trash" for years, not 'special recyclables' for at least a decade, probably more.
This was a VERY high priority project by US battery manufacturers, deliberately designing batteries to be truly disposable without the special recycling they formerly needed.
"As Duracell's website says: âoeAlkaline batteries can be safely disposed of with normal household waste.â Energizer confirms that regular batteries are fine to toss in the trash..." per qz.com
Recycling deposit (Score:3)
I remember as a kid that when you bought bottled soda, you usually paid a deposit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bottle_recycling_in_the_United_States). It seems that recycling deposits should be applied to other things, like batteries.
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For US (Score:2)
These are the locations I found, so far:
Batteries (non-alkaline): Best Buy
Electronics: Best Buy (free up to a limit, in practice they take all)
Printers: again, Best Buy
Ink/Toner: Staples (especially if you get the rebate coupon)
CFLs: Lowe's
Plastic Bags: again, Lowe's
Shredding (paper, plastic): Staples (free up to 5lbs, $1/lbs afterwards)
Large Servers: Check local craigslist, there would be free drop points.
They are a bit all around the place, but it is possible to recycle almost everything for free.
That's not a consumer problem. (Score:2)
Fires in recycler facilities are THEIR problem and machinery should be designed around that for all practical purposes permanent reality.
Batteries cannot be removed from many devices and there are few convenient ways to dispose of them. Many WILL end up in rubbish therefore systems should be designed for reality not fantasy. Fires can be contained and put out.