In a technologically driven world, battery power has become a ubiquitous aspect of everyone’s life. Many devices and machines that you use daily to run your business, to communicate, to make work more manageable, and to boost your productivity largely depend on battery power. However, much as they are indispensable for your energy requirements, the batteries you use also pose serious environmental and health hazards.
The corrosive elements, the toxic metals, and other substances that modern battery technology relies upon come with multiple disadvantages that might, arguably, outweigh the benefits of batteries in the long term. It is a given that the use and disposal of cells have both benefits and challenges that might outweigh one another in any direction, positively or negatively, depending on the way you handle the products.
The Safety and Dangers Posed by Recycling
Due to the high levels of toxicity contained in the substances used for manufacturing batteries, they are a grave environmental risk if they are disposed of anyhow. So one way of ensuring that the batteries you use have minimal adverse effects on your surroundings is to have them recycled. But although recycling reduces the dangers the batteries pose to the environment through careless disposal, the very process of having them recycled also creates new environmental challenges .
According to Isidor Buchmann, the Chief Executive Officer and founder of a manufacturer of battery chargers, Cadex Electronics, the act of recycling batteries also come with other dangers. For instance, you would need to incur significant fuel and transportation costs to have your batteries moved to a recycling site.
Secondly, significantly higher amounts of energy are required in the battery recycling processes such as their proper sorting into various classes of substances and materials that are chemically related. Many experts like Buchmann posit that the energy required to reclaim different metals from the battery is 7-10 times more than what would be needed to get the same type of metals through other methods.
Another adverse environmental impact resulting from the recycling or production of batteries, according to the research scientists from the US Energy Department working at the Argonne National Laboratory, is the release of noxious sulfur monoxide into the atmosphere. This coupled with the intense need for energy makes the entire process not only expensive but also dangerous.
Battery Contamination and Your Health
As it has been noted above, different types of batteries contain a combination of various substances and chemicals which are toxic. Just to mention a few, they can include electrolytes, nickel, lead, cadmium, mercury, and lithium. When they reach the landfills through domestic trash, their casings can sometimes corrode, and the chemicals sip or leach into the ground. Eventually, such chemicals can find their way into the sources of water, and even end up in oceans thereby endangering or decimating marine life.
Human contact with the poisonous chemicals released into the atmosphere due to prolonged underground landfill fires caused by the volatile reactions of lithium’s exposure is also harmful to your health. Various agencies dealing with diseases and poisonous substances warn that chemicals like nickel and cadmium are dangerous human pollutants that can cause developmental disorders, neurological damages, and congenital disabilities.
Despite all the dangers mentioned above, having batteries recycled is still much safer both for the environment and your health. Dangerous heavy metals are found in rechargeable batteries, and therefore, it is highly recommended that you should recycle them.