Household batteries

Management, Reuse, Recycle, and Disposal of Household Batteries. 1226... 

Every year in the United States, billions of batteries are bought, used, and thrown out. In 1998 alone, over 3 billion industrial and household batteries were sold. The demand for batteries can be traced largely to the rapid increase in automobiles, cordless, portable products such as cellular phones, video cameras, laptop computers, and battery-powered tools and toys. 

An increasing number of household batteries are being used today. On average, a person owns about two button batteries, 10 normal (A, AA, AAA, C, D, 9V, etc.) batteries, and throws out about eight household batteries per year. About 3 billion batteries are sold annually in the United States averaging about 32 per family or 10 per person.5 9 Table 29.1 indicates the typical types of household batteries. 

As stated previously, a battery is an electrochemical device with the ability to convert chemical energy to electrical energy to provide power to electronic devices. Household batteries may also contain cadmium, mercury, copper, zinc, lead, manganese, nickel, and lithium, which may create a hazard when disposed incorrectly. The potential problems or hazards of household batteries are similar to that of vehicle batteries. 

In landfills, heavy metals have the potential to leach slowly into soil, groundwater, or surface water. Dry cell batteries contribute about 88% of the total mercury and 50% of the cadmium in the MSW stream. In the past, household batteries accounted for nearly half of the mercury used in the United States and over half of the mercury and cadmium in the MSW stream. When burned, some heavy metals such as mercury may vaporize and escape into the air, and cadmium and lead may end up in the ash. 

There are two major types of household batteries (a) Primary batteries are those that cannot be reused. They include alkaline/manganese, carbon-zinc, mercuric oxide, zinc-air, silver oxide, and other types of button batteries, (b) Secondary batteries are those that can be reused secondary batteries (rechargeable) include lead-acid, nickel-cadmium, and potentially nickel-hydrogen. 

Mercury reduction in household batteries began in 1984 and continues today. During the last five years, the industry has reduced the total amount of mercury usage by about 86%. Some batteries such as the alkaline battery have had about a 97% mercury reduction in the product. Newer alkaline batteries may contain about one-tenth the amount of mercury previously contained in the typical alkaline battery. Some alkaline batteries have zero-added mercury, and several mercury-free, heavy-duty, carbon-zinc batteries are on the market. 

In the United States, Federal and State initiatives are assisting the businesses and consumers in managing, reusing, recycling, and disposal of household batteries. These include the Universal Waste Rule and the Mercury-Containing and Rechargeable Battery Management Act. 

The mercury battery of the type frequently used in watches, calculators, and hearing aids is a primary cell. Although mercury in the water supply is known to cause health problems, no conclusive evidence has been found that the disposal of household batteries contributes to such problems. Nevertheless, manufacturers are working to decrease the amount of mercury in batteries. In recent years, the amount of mercury in alkaline batteries decreased markedly at the same time, the life of such batteries has increased dramatically. 

The Canadian report concluded that dry-cell batteries do not represent a concentrated source of heavy metals in municipal solid waste and their disposal by landfill or incineration poses insignificant risk to human health. Furthermore they concluded that separate collection, storage and disposal of most household batteries produced more significant health related problems and that recycling of primary batteries was neither necessary nor needed. 

Assessing the Environmental Ejfects ofDisposal Alternatives for Household Batteries, Institute for Risk Research, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Feb. 1992... 

An interesting recycling process has been developed the Recytec company in Switzerland in cooperation with ETH in Zurich (25). It combines an initial thermal treatment with a subsequent electrochemical process to recover separated metal values from spent household batteries. A virtue of the process is that it accepts unsorted mixtures of just about all types of batteries likely to be found in household wastes, and it can probably tolerate admixtures of some non-battery wastes as well. Although it is not designed to handle lead-acid batteries, it may well be capable of doing so after some process modifications. 

G. Wallis and S. P. Wolsky, "Options for Household Battery Waste Management." Proc. 2nd ISBWM, Florida, November 1990. 

In 1991 the world s first commercial plant for battery recycling for unsorted household batteries, which uses the Recytec Battery Recycling Process, started operation in Aclens, Switzerland. The technology applies a thermo-mechanical and chemical-electrochemical separation process for recovering valuable materials from unsorted household battery waste. It efficiently refines waste components to raw materials that can be recycled into the industry. 

The urgent need for treatment and recycling of household batteries produced and consumed in Switzerland can be attributed to particular circumstances. Total national battery production has climbed in 1990 to between 3, 700 - 5,000 tons/year. The distribution of battery sales for 1987 and 1988 is provided in Table 15 [62], Despite this rather significant level of battery... 

The costs of the recycling facility are established by the Swiss Model for financing the recycling of household batteries. A surcharge on every battery sold (. 05 to. 30) and an prospective collection efficiency of 80 % are the two basic objectives. The advantage of this Swiss system is that only the actual battery consumers pay the bill and the administrative overhead maintained at a relatively low level. Perhaps the only disadvantage is that, since there is no direct financial gain for the consumer, "public education" represents the only means to stimulate consumers to improve battery collection rates. 

Special wastes these are household hazardous wastes such as paints, thin-ners, household batteries, lead-acid batteries, spray canisters, and the like. They include wastes from residential and commercial soiuces that comprise bulky wastes, consumer electronics, white goods, yard wastes that are collected separately, oil, and tires. 

Tang et al. (2013) studied the recycling of NiMH household batteries. The main parts of a NiMH battery are the cathode, the anode, the electrolyte, a separator, and the steel case. REEs are found in the anode, which consists of a hydrogen storage alloy based on misch metal and nickel alloys. The misch metal contains mainly cerium, lanthanum, praseodymium and neodymium. 

The precipitation method from the H2SO4 leaching solution was compared with the solvent extraction using a sample composed of a mixture of the main types of spent household batteries Zn-C alkaline, Zn-C dry cell, NiCd, NiMH, and Li-ion (Provazi et ah, 2011). The solvent extraction using Cyanex 272 was more efficient in the separation of metals than the selective precipitation. 

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