Knowledge of battery recovery

The slogan that "a cell phone battery pollutes the amount of water equivalent to three standard swimming pools" has long been promoted as a recycling campaign for used batteries. In the past decade or so, it has almost become an environmental promotion post, such as here. However, the authenticity of this propaganda slogan has always been questioned by people, even saying that it is "pseudo-environmental protection knowledge." Why would it say so? The rumor Crusher edited a long article to analyze the scientific problems behind the "waste battery recycling" campaign.

Classification of batteries

The publicity and action of waste battery recycling lasted for 20 years. Its impact involved more than 80 people in the country. Almost all primary and secondary schools and various colleges and universities participated in it. However, there are still many people who vaguely confuse all batteries. This is not scientific. To understand the recycling of used batteries, classification is the first thing to learn.

Batteries in life are often the following:

1, lithium battery, the symbol of lithium chemical element Li can be found on the surface of the battery;

2, alkaline batteries, also known as zinc manganese batteries, may have their English name on the surface of the battery: Alkalinebattery, some will write non-mercury alkaline batteries;

3, nickel-cadmium or nickel-metal hydride batteries, the markings on the batteries are Ni-Cd or Ni-H, the former contains a large amount of heavy metal cadmium, the latter does not contain cadmium, need to pay attention to distinction;

4, lead batteries, often can be found in electric vehicles, the English name is leadbattery.

There are five types of heavy metals that have the greatest impact on the environment: arsenic, lead, cadmium, Chromium and Mercury. In batteries, there are mainly three types of batteries: lead in lead batteries, cadmium in nickel-cadmium batteries, and mercury in alkaline zinc and manganese batteries as additives. Several other common batteries, such as lithium batteries and nickel-metal hydrogen batteries, contain almost negligible amounts of toxic heavy metals. "A used cell phone battery is 100 times more polluting than an ordinary alkaline battery and can pollute 60,000 liters of water, equivalent to three standard swimming pools." If the term refers to the most common cell phone battery lithium batteries or nickel-metal hydrogen batteries, such a pollution description is obviously nonsense.

Should waste batteries be recycled?

The characteristics of each of the three batteries containing heavy metals.

Lead batteries are characterized by being able to sell money. An old lead battery can be sold for more than 100 pieces. There are few phenomena that are discarded casually. Recycling and reuse is the best done. Of course, there are major problems after it is recycled. This is the table below.

Nickel-cadmium batteries are characterized by no future because they contain a large amount of heavy metal cadmium and have been replaced by lithium batteries or nickel-metal hydride batteries in many areas and will be phased out of the market.

Alkaline zinc manganese batteries are characterized by small amounts of harm. The decline in Mercury content in zinc and manganese batteries is the most gratifying result of more than two decades of recycling campaigns for used batteries. With the development of technology, zinc manganese batteries with low Mercury and even no mercury are becoming the main market, reducing their environmental hazards through Mercury reduction. The Technical Policy on the Prevention and Control of Pollution from Waste Battery promulgated by China stipulates that the production of alkaline zinc manganese batteries containing more than 0.0001 % Mercury will be discontinued as of 1 January 2005.

According to data from the China Chemical and Physical Power Industry Association, in 2008 China produced 27 billion zinc and manganese batteries, 990 million nickel-cadmium batteries, 1.29 billion nickel-metal hydride batteries and 2.45 billion lithium batteries.

The first reason for not recycling used batteries comes from alkaline zinc and manganese batteries, which are the most used and produced.

One of the reasons for not recycling used batteries is to "have a lot of people and a lot of people": alkaline zinc manganese batteries, the main body of the battery market, whose Mercury content has been controlled by technical means and will not have a significant impact on the environment and human health; With the exception of nickel-cadmium batteries and lead batteries, other batteries have very little environmental impact and do not need to be recycled. They can be used as general solid waste treatment.

Should waste batteries be recycled "people pick up wood fire high"

"A battery can contaminate three standard swimming pools" is actually a nickel-cadmium battery in the battery. Let's check it out. Suppose it is a 12-gram nickel-cadmium battery, of which 47% is cadmium, which means that it contains 11.3 grams of cadmium. According to China's surface water environmental quality standards, the cadmium content of the second type of water should not exceed 5 micrograms per liter. A simple calculation can be obtained. The cadmium in a nickel-cadmium battery can pollute 226,000 liters of water, which is equivalent to 1.2 in a standard swimming pool (25 meters wide, 50 meters long, 1.5 meters deep). In other words, this sentence is basically correct in this case. Nickel-cadmium batteries were widely used in small devices such as mobile phones in the world in the 1980s and 1990s, but now nickel-cadmium batteries have not been seen on mobile phones, and nickel-cadmium batteries are more suitable for replacing nickel-cadmium batteries. lithium battery. So now it is completely wrong to say that a cell phone battery can contaminate the water of three standard swimming pools.

So why are such highly toxic nickel-cadmium batteries allowed to be used, and no case of cadmium poisoning due to daily battery use has been found so far?

There are two reasons: First, cadmium in nickel-cadmium batteries is limited to packaging and is difficult to leak into the environment; Second, cadmium leaked to the environment is diluted by soil or water and the concentration does not reach the dose that can cause poisoning.

In 2003, such a story was published in the "Environmental Herald": On November 9, 1939, a brain hospital in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, received a man who was unconscious and eventually died of invalid treatment. Since then, 15 "crazy people" with the same symptoms have appeared one after another in the same village as the deceased. This attracted the attention of the relevant authorities. After investigation, it was found that the deceased had drunk the water from three wells around a shop before his death, and dug 380 pieces of rotten waste batteries within 5 meters of one of the wells! It turned out that the store had caused the tragedy by burying the waste batteries left by the customers in the backyard and polluting the surrounding wells.

Although the story is thrilling, it is a pity that there is no official record of the information in Japanese or English. Obviously, this story is unlikely to be a historical fact, but it is more likely to be a rumor, an urban legend created by literary people.

Leave the story out of the question. Would something like this have happened if hundreds of batteries had actually been buried underground?

Before giving an answer, let us first learn a concept - "environmental capacity."

In environmental science, in the face of countless kinds of substances in the world, it is not a simple matter to distinguish between good and bad. For example, nitrogen and phosphorus are good friends of plants. We love to drink a lot of phosphorus in Coca-Cola. There is a lot of nitrogen in it, but because of the excessive application of humans, it causes eutrophication in the lake, leading to the death of a large number of aquatic plants and animals, and suddenly it becomes a pollutant that shakes hands everywhere. The reason for this is because the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus in the lake exceeds the environmental capacity.

The environmental capacity is like a balloon. If the balloon is inflated too much, it will rise and break. At this time, it is called the environmental capacity, and the thing that exceeds the environmental capacity is called the pollutant. The environmental capacity of nitrogen and phosphorus is very large and is not considered to be a pollutant in many cases, but in eutrophic lakes, they are pollutants. And some substances, their environmental capacity is very small, they are the toxic substances we often say, such as heavy metals. Although heavy metals are called toxic substances, they are harmless to our bodies at low concentrations. Most people don't know that heavy metals are widespread in our living environment. The soil naturally contains a variety of heavy metals that enter the body through plants or air. These "toxic substances" do not let the reason we are sick is that the number is too small and does not exceed the environmental capacity.

Whether the substance with strong toxicity will affect the environmental quality, it must be seen whether its quantity exceeds the environmental capacity.

An ideal waste battery recycling system should be like this: the battery manufacturer sells the battery to the public. After the people use it, it is put into the recycling bin. The battery in the recycling bin is further collected and collected into the battery recycling enterprise. Useful materials in used batteries are provided to battery manufacturers as raw materials for the production of batteries. This completes a beautiful material cycle in which no waste is produced and released into the environment, creating potential contamination. However, the recycling of used batteries in China is in a strange situation, the people are enthusiastic, the enterprises wait and see, the government does not act. The current recycling system basically ends up in the recycling bin, which makes the number of used batteries stored in various places more and more. When the amount is large enough, it exceeds the environmental capacity and becomes an environmental pollution incident.

Therefore, the "1939 Japan Kanagawa Waste Battery Incident" caused by the so-called 380-cell battery accumulation is not impossible. The media has found that 400 tons of old batteries in Chengdu Yigu Waste Management Station could not be processed for 9 years. Fortunately, this is in the solid waste management station. If it is placed in another place, it is not safe to keep it, and it will definitely cause environmental pollution.

The National List of Hazardous Wastes promulgated in 2008 stipulates that "waste drugs and their packaging materials, waste pesticides and disinfectants and their packaging materials, waste paints and solvents, waste mineral oils and their packaging materials, waste film materials and waste images generated in daily household life" Paper, waste fluorescent lamps, waste thermometers, waste sphygmomanometers, waste nickel-cadmium batteries and Mercury oxide batteries, and electronic hazardous waste may not be managed in accordance with hazardous waste. "It is based on the fact that when these potential pollutants are dispersed in the environment, the concentration is low, generally does not exceed the environmental capacity, and the degree of danger is small. This is not to say that "spent nickel-cadmium batteries are not hazardous wastes", but "these wastes generated by daily household life are not hazardous wastes." Therefore, there is a supplementary clause after this paragraph: "After the waste listed in the preceding paragraph is collected from domestic waste, its transportation, storage, use or disposal is managed according to hazardous waste. In other words, once these potential pollutants are concentrated, they must be managed as hazardous waste.

To sum up, a nickel-cadmium battery is a match, and a pile of nickel-cadmium batteries is a pile of gunpowder.

One of the reasons for not promoting the recycling of used batteries is that "people pick up firewood and have a high flame." Do not collect any used batteries until they find a home. Otherwise, concentrated pollutants may cause great environmental harm.

The future of used batteries, or recycling?

Since the daily use of used batteries will not cause environmental pollution problems, so we do not recycle used batteries?

To answer this question, we need to know where a strand of battery came from.

The grain was grown in the fields, the batteries were of course bought from the supermarket, no, from the factory. The raw materials in the factory came from the smelter. The ore needed by the smelter was brought from the mine, and the ore was buried underground.

In 2011, the state promulgated the Twelfth Five-Year Plan for Prevention and Control of Heavy Metal Pollution (2010-2020). The focus on the control of five heavy metals, arsenic, lead, cadmium, Chromium and Mercury, and the regulation of five key industries: non-ferrous metal extraction, non-ferrous metal smelting, lead battery storage, leather and its products, chemical raw materials and chemical products manufacturing.

Of these five industries, lead storage batteries are obviously mainly lead pollution. The leather and its products industry is Chromium pollution. (Reference: How harmful is Chromium in leather? ). The remaining three industries can not correspond to some kind of heavy metal one by one. In sentence line, what is produced is compound pollution. These three industries provide a variety of materials for the entire socioeconomic, some of which are used for batteries.

Previous analysis, many people must have commented, even nickel-cadmium batteries are not pollution, so what is pollution? Pollution is in these industries, in battery factories. Searching the Internet for "battery factory pollution" can get a lot of accident reports.

Such accidents occur not only in battery factories, but also in chemical factories that provide raw materials for battery factories, smelters that provide materials for chemical factories, and mines that provide ores for smelters. It should be noted that heavy metal cadmium not only comes from the production process of nickel-cadmium batteries, but also from the production process of zinc manganese batteries and lead batteries. This is because metal minerals usually have a variety of metals. Cadmium is a by-product of lead-zinc ore. Most of China's famous cadmium high pollution areas are near lead-zinc ore, such as the lead-zinc mine in Hechi, Guangxi, and the ancient lead-zinc mine in Zhangzhou, Zhejiang.

Ordinary people are not exposed to heavy metals because our environment has a huge environmental capacity, but the environmental capacity is limited. In some places, large-scale pollution has emerged. In some provinces in the South, heavy metal pollution has become a province-wide problem.

To reduce heavy metal pollution, it is not enough to strengthen environmental supervision and management. There are usually two other ways to solve this problem. First, move heavy metal-related industries elsewhere. China is a major producer of batteries, producing more than 40 billion in 2009, accounting for more than 50 % of the world's total, of which about 30 billion are exported, and the proportion of exports is 70 %. Obviously this method is not suitable for China. Second, recycling is the best way to tackle heavy metal pollution by transforming a unidirectional heavy metal transfer system from mine to home into a recycling system from product to scrap to product.

In fact, not just batteries, all non-renewable substances are necessary for recycling, but they are gradually required by the degree of difficulty.

"Gathering sand into tower" for recycling used batteries

Recycling is easy. The ease of recovery is affected by two factors, one is the recycling value and the other is the recycling pathway.

Things that have both recycling value and recycling route are the easiest to recycle, such as cars. This is not much to explain; Things that lack economic value and have no means of recycling are the most difficult to recycle. For example, fluorescent lamps, which mostly contain heavy metal mercury, are very difficult to recycle because of fragile and difficult to reuse.

The representative of no recovery route with economic value is lead battery. For lead batteries, according to data provided by the Battery Industry Association, as of March 2011, there were nearly 3,000 waste battery recycling enterprises in China, 80 % of which were mainly self-employed, and nearly 2 million tons of lead-acid batteries were recovered each year. Among them, these small smelters, which are not qualified and environmentally friendly, control 80 % of the recycling share. The unordered recovery of lead batteries is one of the reasons that cause large areas of lead in China. There are similar problems with the disposal of electronic device waste. We do not have a large-scale recycling system at present. Instead, we use foreign recycling systems. In some parts of China, the electronic waste dismantling industry has been formed. This unique phenomenon in China has created Guiyu, Guangdong Province, which is known as the "world's largest garbage city." One of the reasons for this situation is that there is no systematic recycling route and it can not support a large-scale recycling system. This makes it difficult for self-employed recycling enterprises to occupy the market and be subject to supervision. This pseudo-recycling system is the enemy of environmental protection.

The representatives of the lack of economic value and the recycling system are zinc manganese batteries, nickel-cadmium batteries, lithium batteries and other types of batteries. Among the two factors that affect recycling, recovery pathways are much more important than economic value. There is nothing to recycle, but there is no human waste of economic value. The reason why the economic value of many wastes is not significant is because the amount of recycling is not large enough. When there is a recycling system, the concentration of waste to a certain amount will lead to the formation of industries, and quantitative changes will cause qualitative changes. A sufficient number of batteries are continuously collected together, and with the support of the government, a battery recycling system can be established.

After more than 20 years of environmental efforts, the concept of recycling used batteries has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, but because of the lack of downstream processing, it has not played a greater role. It is easy to build a battery recycling system if this idle folk recycling behavior becomes a systematic government behavior.

Conclusion

Let's conclude with one last sentence. For individuals, do not collect used batteries; But for a better environment, we must support and urge the early establishment of a recycling system for used batteries. In fact, it is not only the waste battery recycling system, the entire society should be the garbage recycling system.

The page contains the contents of the machine translation.