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Comment by ris | Hacker News Reader

Sadly lithium still isn't scarce enough to make it uneconomic to produce a perfectly good rechargeable battery and sell it as single-use https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5korWqCcsHE

I can tell you where you're going to be able to find those vast lithium deposits soon - landfill sites.

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Honest question: is there a better option for non-rechargeable batteries for portable electronics? Where "better" means some combination of lower cost, higher energy density, more recyclability, more safety, or similar.

Plain lithium batteries (non-rechargeable) are cheaper and have higher capacity than lithium ion. Other factors are basically similar. I think the only reason to use lithium ion when you don't care about recharging is if you have a lot of extras, say manufacturing rejects or have some serious economies of scale going on.

Disposable lithium batteries (lithium iron disulfide) can hold a charge for 20 years in storage and have a greater temperature tolerance compared to alkaline. They're ideal for uses like an emergency flashlight that you leave in the glove compartment.

They're also 1.5v which makes them suitable as a replacement in for alkaine AA/AAA batteries. Lithium ion is 3.7v so it only works in devices made for it.

They're also lower weight, which makes the fact that they have higher total power and peak current even more impressive. They're ideal for not just emergency flashlights because of their longer storage time, but also for anything where you care about weight and power like a backpacking headlamp or bike light. It's just amazing chemistry.

It surprises me that alkaline batteries are holding on as well as they are. If something with the performance difference between alkaline and lithium ion disulfide came along for rechargeable lithium ion cells, every manufacturer would be on it just as fast as they could possibly pivot their supply chains. I guess people just don't care about primary cells as much.

Hi I worked for a short time at Duracell. I do not know why they were ultimately rejected, but all of the consumer battery companies were researching lithium cells decades ago. I suspect it is some combination safety, environmental, and cost concerns of Lithium vs Manganese. The alkaline manganse cells still have very impressive lifetimes and energy density. The chemistry is amazingly suited for one off cells.

It could also be there is just not a lot of market pressure. If a manganese alkaline cell last a bit more than ten years, are you going to be upset with Duracell ten years later when you have no idea how much it has been utilized?

Rejected? They're in just about every grocery store at twice the price. But you have to be drawing a pretty high current before they last twice as long.

Rejected for replacing alkaline cells for AA, AAA, C, D, etc. Also I need to make a correction the comparison is between zinc and lithium, not manganese.

I often read that lithium cells suffer from volume changes during use but do not know if this affects lithium primary cells. The alkaline cells virtually never leak.

They replaced a significant fraction of the AA, AAA, C, D cells. But the alkalines are cheaper and on the same shelf.

Rejected for bulk replacement then

In all the towns I've lived in, it's illegal to put fluorescent bulbs and lithium batteries in the trash. They're supposed to be disposed of as hazardous waste.

It's not like they can really inspect the contents of your bin before the machinery dumps it all into the truck. You'd have to do something really dumb to get caught. Those rules really depend on most people not being dicks about it.

Most garbage collection in Australia has a camera to inspect bin contents and catch people abusing the recycling system.

It's been in place for a decade now.

https://www.news-mail.com.au/news/waste-truck-watching-you-g...

That's interesting. The non-recyclable waste is normally packaged up into black bags here in the UK and it's often pretty noxious. They're not gonna slice them open so a camera can have a look, so people can put almost anything in them so long as it fits.

My batteries and bulbs are picked up together with the rest of my trash, I just put it in a little box hanging on the bin. There's no reason what so ever to not put them in the right place. So everyone does.

Most supermarkets where I live have a battery bin near the entrance, and I've seen many times various packs or even sealed lead acids crammed in.

> In all the towns I've lived in, it's illegal to put [..] lithium batteries in the trash

That's not true anywhere in the US, for the primary cell LiFeS02 batteries (such as the Energizer L91). They are not considered hazardous waste and the suggested disposal route is your trash can.

You are probably thinking of lithium-polymer batteries, which are indeed hazardous waste (and cargo).

I wonder how can this be economically viable...

This is paraphrased from last time it came up so I apologize for any inaccuracy:

They're reject cells from the manufacturing process. In manufacturing you have a specification your products must meet or exceed for you to sell them with a certain rating. Some fraction of the cells a factory produces don't meet that specification, so they're either thrown out or used in unimportant applications like this.

It's 3£, which is $3.88. For a 600mAh battery. You can buy an 8-pack of 2800mAh batteries (each) for $15 on Amazon. So the manufacturer is definitely making money.

The recycling part is potentially interesting. Whoever figures out how to get a ton of these discarded can make money by making power packs.

You can only compare capacity in mAh if the batteries you're comparing have the same voltage. If not, you need to convert to mWh.

A 600mAh 3.7V battery holds the same amount of energy as a 1500mAh 1.5V battery.

We're talking about lithium ion batteries. They are all about the same voltage.

Except the comment to which I replied was talking about '8-pack of 2800mAh' from Amazon. I'm pretty sure they're talking about 1.5v Ni-MH AA batteries.

Oh, maybe I shouldn't have given them the benefit of the doubt. Why would they talk about incompatible batteries? Weird.

You can get a four pack of 2800mAh lithium ion batteries for that price, though.

Every time I throw an aluminum can in the trash I tell myself that I’m incentivizing the future mining of landfills. One man’s trash...

The earth's crust is 13% aluminium by weight, so there is no chance there ever will be a shortage. The thing with aluminium is rather the amount of energy needed to produce it compared to the energy needed to recycle it, which is about 20:1.

Once a can has been put into a landfill mixed with other stuff and with time also oxidized, that advantage is mostly gone.

> Once a can has been put into a landfill mixed with other stuff and with time also oxidized, that advantage is mostly gone.

What is the typical oxidization rate? (Average by mass, I guess.) I thought oxidation was mostly negligible because, unlike rust, aluminum oxide forms a protective layer. I would think this is fairly effective in a dump.

Nimble robots and better image recognition will eventually drive the cost of landfill retrieval way down.

> The earth's crust is 13% aluminium by weight

I found this astonishing, and looked for sources. It looks like they[1][2] say it's more like 8.2% aluminum by weight. That's still quite high, though, and also it's the third highest behind oxygen and silicon. (If you exclude oxygen, I think it goes up to 15.4% aluminum.) Very interesting.

[1] http://education.jlab.org/itselemental/ele013.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

> no chance there ever will be a shortage.

In our lifetimes.

One can only hope that by the time we turned 13% of our crust into cans we also have technology to mine stuff from asteroids.

I think it'll take a long time to use up the crust.

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