Okay, so what do you do with old watch batterys?

I've been saving all these old spent button batteries and others. I've heard the garbage is not where you want to put them... Okay, but where?

My dump has a place for car batteries but I've never seen anything else there. And how about lithium batteries, like an old power tool battery. All these have bad metals, right

Thanks, Rick

They are supposed to be recycled but nobody will take them :X

I've been trying for years but none of the recycling places will take them so I throw them in the garbage

Lowe's used to have a recepticle for bad screw gun batteries, I guess you could probably throw them in there. But along that line of thought, the powers that make decisions for us have decided that incandescent bulbs are bad, compac flourescent bulbs are good. The problem is that every compac flourescent bulb has a small amount of elemental mercury in it. Without the mercury, the bulb won't light. What becomes of the mercury in those bulbs when they hit the dump?

I bet they make dumping bulbs in the trash illegal and make us put them in a special recycle pickup spot. California already adds a "hazardous materials" tax onto the price of a tv or computer monitor just to help offset the costs of special handling of these materials when they hit the recycler.

alan



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/29/2010 06:07PM by alanrw.

Supposedly Staples takes these things. We really should not want the ground to have these, the water table gets soured too. I'll give them a call tomorrow and report back.

So, electric cars. What do we do with those batteries? and can lithium batteries be recycled in the first place?

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rkj
Supposedly Staples takes these things. We really should not want the ground to have these, the water table gets soured too. I'll give them a call tomorrow and report back.

So, electric cars. What do we do with those batteries? and can lithium batteries be recycled in the first place?

Around here, Staples won't take any batteries smaller than AAA and then only if you buy replacements

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Archeo-peteriX

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rkj
Supposedly Staples takes these things. We really should not want the ground to have these, the water table gets soured too. I'll give them a call tomorrow and report back.

So, electric cars. What do we do with those batteries? and can lithium batteries be recycled in the first place?

Around here, Staples won't take any batteries smaller than AAA and then only if you buy replacements

Thanks Peter, why doesn't that surprise me! These new light bulbs that have mercury in them (that's another issue), Janet broke one in a small enclosed area the other day; I think there should be real (easy to read) warnings on them so when you buy them you know what you're getting in to.

I feel these manufacturers make these products and are not honest with the risks involved. That's just bad business and it piss' me off!

Usual stupid shit,

Rick

Well, flourescent lights have been with us forever. They are the default for most office buildings. Imagine how many have hit the dumps over the past decades. It is more recent that screw in bulbs have become available and incandescents legislated out of existance.

alan

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alanrw
Well, flourescent lights have been with us forever. They are the default for most office buildings. Imagine how many have hit the dumps over the past decades. It is more recent that screw in bulbs have become available and incandescents legislated out of existance.

alan

You mean florescents (the tube ones that have been around forever) have Mercury in them like these new energy saving bulbs? I'm no tree huger but (okay, maybe a little of a one) I don't like putting that crap in the ground. At my dump I don't get the feeling they really care about the finer points of recycling

My original point was, these new lithium batteries have nasty stuff in them and you should have a place to turn them in. I'm only one guy but I'm going to try to fix that in my town! I'll keep you guys posted on my progress I read that just having them around is unhealthy.

If anybody has info that could help my cause/plight please send it my way. I'll do some investigation on just how bad these things are... Peace

While they still have a little ways to go, Lithium batteries are much less toxic than lead, nicad or nimh ones.
Research is on going to produce Lithium batteries with more power and ultimately no toxic compounds.

In the mean time, we really do need to find places to take these things.

Here ya go;


•The tube is filled with argon gas and a small bit of mercury. When the CFL is turned on, electricity flows through the argon gas. Some of the individual electrons strike mercury molecules. When they do, the mercury molecules absorb energy from the electrons.
Making Light
•The mercury then discharges this energy as a photon of ultraviolet light. Ultraviolet light is similar to visible light, but it is outside of the visible spectrum. The ultraviolet photons inside a compact fluorescent light strike a phosphor coating on the inside of the bulb. This phosphor coating works a bit like the mercury molecule does -- it absorbs the energy from the photon and re-emits it, this time as a photon of visible light. Without the mercury to create the original ultraviolet photon, the fluorescent coating wouldn't be able to produce visible light.


So basically, flourescent light tubes, straight or coiled have always had mercury in them, a miniscule amount, but elemental mercury none the less.

alan

Yes yes Peter, it's only right.

Thanks Alan, knowledge is a powerful thing and it's a pleasure reading your post

We (= those living in Belgium) can hand in our old batteries in recycling parks (our local park required € 1 entrance fee) for free. We can do the same with garden waste, paper, plastics, bottles, cans, wood, metals, construction material (limited amounts of asbestos) etc. Keeping access easy keeps us from throwing it where it shouldn't be thrown.

In the European Union, incandescent lamps below 100 Watt are no longer to be sold. A shame, I think, as in some places it is all you need. Lights that are lit for only short amounts of time, or many times, shouldn't be of the CFL type, those are not made for it.
Recycling CFL type lamps also is a lot more difficult than a regular one, those you just have to drop and all the different materials are separated.
Incandescent bulbs shouldn't be banned, but people should be taught when and how to use them.

As of Jan1 incandescent lights can no longer be ordered and put on the store shelves. When the current stocks are gone, only CFLs will be available.

Law makers and bureaucrats are certainly stupid

The amount of energy saved won't equal the amount of energy required to recycle the darn things

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Archeo-peteriX
The amount of energy saved won't equal the amount of energy required to recycle the darn things

That's what I wanted to say. The same is valid in the cash for clunkers program, the energy required to produce a new car doesn't match up with the fuel saved by this same new car.

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Michiel 318iS

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Archeo-peteriX
The amount of energy saved won't equal the amount of energy required to recycle the darn things

That's what I wanted to say. The same is valid in the cash for clunkers program, the energy required to produce a new car doesn't match up with the fuel saved by this same new car.

And the additional cost of owning a hybrid takes about 10 years on average to balance out against the cost of a non hybrid. Then the additional energy required to recycle all the parts of the hybrid make it even more of a money waste.

Electric cars are going to be the ones that save the planet. Of course the Air powered car could go a long way to helping that too.

Well, if you really look at it, the cash for clunkers was merely to encourage people to buy new cars, a great one time rebate if you will. I guess they thought it would jump start the economy by giving the new car industry a shot in the arm.

alan

Now there was a misdirected billion or more. The energy savings of repairing and using cars already in running condition would have offset the better gas mileage of all those new cars for many years. Those cars being crushed took them out of the market for people who could not afford a new car and made used cars more expensive for poor people.
All around, the whole program had the opposite of the supposed intended effect except to convince people who might have been considering a new car to buy it a little sooner. The major beneficiary was government as it had to be increased to administer the program.

Bob in Everett

Probably part of the reason the American economy is in a spiral dive, America has always been a disposable society, buy something, use it for a short while, a car, maybe for a few years, then chuck it and buy a new one, which was great and worked very well, it kept people in jobs, the money kept circulating and things were relatively cheap, due to the vast quantities they were produced in, which was great for he economy.
Except now the problem is that more and more of the manufacturing sector is being shipped offshore to places like China, and then the products brought into the country, which now leaves people without jobs, American dollars leaving the country and becoming a country that imports most of its goods, rather than producing goods as it used to. So by being a disposable society now, it is just pushing the country further into debt and forcing everyone to tighten the purse strings, so the more the public consumes, the worse it gets, and if they don't, the money does not circulate and the economy stagnates, damned if you do and damned if you don't.
On Sunday I watched a documentary on the EV1 electric car built by GM and its demise, called 'Who killed the electric car' anyone seen it, it was very interesting, sucks that the big corporations can hold Joe public over a barrel and there is not a thing he can do about it.

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E30'S AREN'T BUILT, THEY'RE CAUGHT IN THE WILD!!!



When in doubt, use full throttle,
it may not improve the situation, but it will end the suspence.

So, in my quest for turning in these battery's I learned my town has two "Stop Days" (which I knew) that will take these things. One year I bought a large electrical transformer loaded with pcb's to them a few years ago. Felt great getting that puppy out of my basement!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/08/2011 03:03PM by rkj.