Taking Charge
by Sarah Langdon

Green Magazine April 2008

They may seem small, but churning through batteries adds up to a lot of hazardous waste. What can you do to lessen the environmental impact? Sandra Langdon finds out.

Laptops, mobile phones, digital cameras, MP3 players, multiple remote controls scattered across the coffee table – we have become technology gluttons. If a gadget doesn’t produce sound, light and movement to make our lives easier, well, forget it. The dark side to all this high-powered fun, though, is our massive consumption of batteries.

In Australia, we don't make our own batteries. So the ones we use travel a long way to get here, only to be thrown out after a short life According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, we imported 267 million single-use batteries and 50 million rechargeable batteries in 2004 - that's excluding batteries In cordless power tools or portable electronics. Ironically, we also export the raw materials to battery-manufacturing countries. But the greatest environmental concern surrounding batteries is the impact they have at the end of their lives. Australia is yet to embrace battery recycling. Some 94 per cent of dead batteries end up in landfill, and this is where the most serious problems start.

Heavy metals
Sliding a battery into its neat little space in a gadget completes an electrical circuit. When the ends connect with the contacts, chemicals inside the battery start to react; this produces an  electrical current as the negative charges migrate to the positive end, and hey-presto, your pink bunny starts beating his drum.

Batteries use a variety of chemicals to power their reactions. Single-use or ‘primary’ household batteries are largely made up of iron, manganese and zinc. Rechargeable or ‘secondary’ varieties need more complicated chemical reactions to reverse the current, so they generally include lithium, nickel-metal hydride (N-MH) and nickel-cadmium (Ni-Cd). It's these last two chemicals – nickel and cadmium – that cause the most trouble. University of Sydney associate professor in soil science, Balwant Singh, says they are carcinogenic to humans and harmful to the environment. "They are extremely toxic, especially cadmium, and can cause damage to soil micro-organisms and affect the breakdown of organic matter." Singh says exposure to cadmium can also cause irreversible damage to kidneys and lungs in people. For these reasons “Nickel-cadmium batteries should not go into landfill".

But often landfill is exactly where batteries end up. Regulations governing battery disposal differ in each state. In Western Australia, both disposable and rechargeable batteries are classed as hazardous waste; they are placed in steel drums encased in concrete within secure landfills so that air and water can't corrode the battery casings. In Queensland, by comparison, people throw batteries in the bin with impunity.

The only batteries routinely recycled in Australia are the lead-acid batteries that power our cars and trucks; more than 90 per cent of those are recycled. But moves are underway to establish household battery recycling. In Melbourne, a free recycling service for household batteries began in June 2007, A Joint initiative of government body Sustainability Victoria, management group Cleanaway and battery manufacturer Uniross, Batteryback provides containers at selected shops where people can drop off their dead batteries.

Sustainability Victoria project manager Li. Richmond says the service began as a three-month trial but will most likely extend to 12 months. "We are trying to demonstrate that a retail-based battery collection initiative can actually work." She says the program is stockpiling alkaline batteries to provide sufficient material for a future recycling service in Australia, while Ni-Cds are shipped to France where the useful metals are extracted and reused,

Business is getting in on the act too, Darryl ' Moore, a resource recovery consultant based in Newcastle, NSW, pioneered a commercial battery collection service for Cleanaway, Businesses purchase a battery recycling box for $55, which includes delivery, return postage of the full box and recycling (Cleanaway sorts the batteries and ships them overseas for recycling). Moore was surprised that his first customer turned out to be a youth hostel. Visitors, apparently, were continually asking where they could leave batteries. "European backpackers are quite astonished that we don't have battery recycling in Australia," he says.

In 2005, Canon began looking for a way to manage its ex-service camera batteries and achieve its target of zero-to-landfill. The company sought advice from the CSIRO and as a result, the Australasian Battery Recycling Initiative (ABRI) was formed. ABRI believes that it can demonstrate effective collection and recycling systems within a year or two with industry and government investments of about $200,000, "Our aim is to collect 100 tonnes" in the initial stages, says chairman Joe Herbertson. "The feeling is it's time to move up a cog."

Rechargeables
Part of the reason for Australia's lackadaisical attitude toward recycling Ni-Cds, according to Will Vautier, Australian sales and marketing manager at Uniross, is that our rechargeable market is still very small compared to Europe's, He believes nothing substantial has been done to promote rechargeables in Australia, "The main players are interested in disposables," he says, In 2007, Uniross commissioned the first worldwide study that compared disposable batteries with Ni-MH rechargeables. In the study, the French company Bio Intelligence Service examined all the impacts of the batteries from raw materials through to disposal or reuse. It found that for each kilowatt-hour of energy produced, rechargeable batteries have up to 32 times less impact on the environment than disposables. And this included potential Impacts on the soil from the disposal of nickel.

The largest supplier of single-use batteries in Australia, the US global giant Energizer Holdings Inc, says it is more concerned with the environmental impacts of collecting batteries for recycling than the impacts of the batteries in landfill. Graeme Clench, marketing director for Energizer in Australia, points to a 2004 UK Department of Trade and Industry analysis of the life cycle of batteries. It concluded that while recycling does make good use of metals, these benefits are outweighed by the environmental impacts of collection and transport.

According to Clench, it's important to distinguish between non-hazardous and hazardous batteries, and it makes more sense to stop batteries with hazardous components from entering the market in the first place. As a result, Energizer no longer sells Ni-Cds in its recyclable range, preferring to stock NI-MHs, he says.

The other big player on the battery scene in Australia is Duracell. On its website, the company claims to be "a leader in industry efforts to develop sound recycling options". However, its US parent company Procter & Gamble is not involved in existing efforts to develop battery recycling in Australia. But, says spokeswoman Jolie Egan, Duracell has converted consumers from the more old-fashioned zinc-carbon batteries to longer-lasting alkaline batteries, significantly reducing the number discarded.

The future
Sanyo is taking a slightly different tack. National service manager John Gillam says the company, which is a member of ABRI, recycles batteries in Japan. "Sanyo recognises the importance to the community to have a solution for batteries at the end of their life," he says. "As a major manufacturer we have a role to play."

Aside from battery recycling, Sanyo has also devised a new kind of rechargeable. The company hopes its Eneloop battery will bridge the divide between disposables and rechargeables. Until now, rechargeable batteries have been sold in a discharged state because a charged battery would slowly discharge itself anyway. "One major disadvantage of the rechargeable was it wasn't ready to use [immediately]," Gillam says. "Eneloop overcomes that issue. The technology allows it to hold its charge while on the shelf," In addition, Sanyo donates five cents from the sale of every Eneloop to Clean Up Australia.

To bolster recycling, Darryl Moore advocates a user-pays system. He believes a levy of a few cents when batteries are purchased could go towards establishing a recycling program to keep them out of landfill. "In all funding schemes overseas, a levy on the purchase of batteries is present," he says. "One or two cents on average per battery could fund recycling."

Moore is also the development manager for AusBatt, a battery recycling initiative of AusZinc Metals & Alloys, AusZinc recovers and recycles zinc from galvanizing operations and other industries. It has developed a process (patent pending) that will enable the recycling of alkaline batteries. According to Moore, rechargeable battery recycling is not currently feasible in Australia because of the small volume of rechargebles used.

Moore says many people don't understand the significance of different battery chemistries, and will try to recycle hazardous types that, for now, contaminate the process. He thinks the solution is a recycling scheme that gathers all batteries then sorts them out. "Unless you collect all [battery types], you won't have a successful program," he says.

SANDRA LANGDON is a freelance Journalist based in Melbourne who is in the midst of a home 'greenovation'.