It’s sad that we (barely) care more about recycling soda cans than we do batteries. If throwing batteries in the regular trash is such a costly thing why on Earth don’t we collect a deposit and offer deposit return to anyone who turns them in?
Given how ubiquitous and common battery usage is, why on earth is it SO DIFFICULT TO RECYCLE THEM?
My garbage is collected once a week, green waste too, recycling every other week, but regular use stuff like batteries is NEVER picked up I have to take it somewhere.
I'm sorry but if we actually cared about preventing these things from making it into landfills, we'd make it as easy as possible for people to recycle them.
Also, "take it somewhere" isn't that bad when "somewhere" is home depot, which has a battery disposal bin.
Why not?
> Also, "take it somewhere" isn't that bad when "somewhere" is home depot, which has a battery disposal bin.
I think you underestimate how lazy people are. Lets not leave the health and safety of our landfills up to something as risky as human laziness.
If we're serious about this, mandatory bi-yearly pickup of hazardous material (batteries, paint, solvents, etc), with awareness campaigns seems reasonable.
Push it down as a requirement on garbage companies and then monitor it through them.
Because weekly pickup is expensive to run.
In most places you pay for your weekly pickup one way or another. There’s no way people are going to vote for or approve an additional weekly pickup charge for something they dispose of very infrequently.
There are many stores with battery drop offs. If you really want to make a dent, put the battery recycling drop offs in grocery stores and put signage around it.
Routine pickup would be more hassle: You’d need to figure out the bins, the pickup method, the scheduling, etc. It’s really terrible for anything that isn’t both large and steady, like your waste bin.
I have a lot of battery powered devices, but it would take me a year to fill even a grocery bag with discarded batteries (with the exception of the occasional car or UPS battery swap every couple of years). But I generally use rechargeable batteries.
Just have some hardware stores keep a bucket labeled “recycle your batteries here” and the recycler can make monthly visits.
Even the municipal recycling center, where I sometimes take bags full of paper or plastic bottles, refuses to take batteries.
The local Batteries+Bulbs store is the only place left near me. For how long?
It should be FAR far easier to do.
There are only two ways to prevent this:
1. The waste management system should put everything on a big conveyor belt and filter out toxic/dangerous waste so that the consumer doesn't have to care about special handling.
2. Those materials should be outlawed from being used in consumer tech.
The last time I left some out, I could swear I saw the driver just pick up the recycle bin with the baggie of batteries on top and dump it in with all the rest of the recycling (so why put the baggie on top?). For the 2-3 times a year I do this, it would only take about 30 seconds to hop out and grab the baggie by hand to store it separately. Maybe they sort it out at the recycling facility, but I've also been told that almost all our recycling ends up in the landfill anyway.
And in some other places any contaminated recycling (oil, food residues etc) is redirected to landfill/incinerators.
Many retail stores accept lithium batteries for recycling. You might already be going to a store every few weeks or months that accepts them.
(This is also why "electricity is more environmentally friendly than burning fuel" is not necessarily true).
Almost any larger battery has a resale value and you could reuse instead of recycle.
Around my area in Metro Detroit there are battery stores all over that will buy used batteries. It might be only a dollar for some random laptop battery while car batteries etc are basically the core price of $50-$60 per.
At the very least, there is value in the raw metals as scrap.
that's exactly how it works in Germany. By law batteries must not go into household trash and retailers are required to take back used ones free of charge.
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/topics/waste-resources/pro...
Why is that sad? It takes more energy to extract aluminum from bauxite with electrolysis than it does to recycle used aluminum. Same with steel. Depending on the source, 30-50% of aluminum and steel made in the US is from recycled stock.