How to deal with used lithium batteries

Pick out the leaded mercury-containing waste battery and let it in that box until you find the waste battery recycling facility. Waste batteries without lead and mercury, if you are in the city, put them in any city garbage bin and the sanitation will handle it, even if it is not dealt with, the reason will be explained later. If you are in the countryside, two or three groups, throw it into a remote place that is not close to the water source (well, reservoir).

It is a premise to recycle waste batteries, which is specifically a lead-containing mercury-containing battery, because lead and mercury can be directly absorbed by the human body, and the damage is relatively large. However, this battery was banned from production by the state more than a decade ago, and the market has long since disappeared. Nickel-cadmium batteries are now used as large batteries and battery cars. If you have a small one, please stay.

The ordinary batteries on the market today are only lithium batteries, nickel-hydrogen batteries, and alkaline batteries. After these batteries are discarded, chemical reactions continue to occur, revealing chemicals.

These substances are divided into two categories, one of which naturally aggregated into a large molecule and cannot be absorbed by plant animals, including humans.

The second type enters the soil in the form of trace elements, some of which are selectively absorbed by the plants, and the rest are weathered with the natural dilution of wind and rain. The part that is absorbed by the plant may be eaten into the body by animals and people, but the human body will also choose it and will be excreted without being accepted by the body. Of course, there will still be a very small amount of trace elements left in the human body, but it will never be more than the pollutants in the car exhaust that you inhale every year.

There is always a saying in the media: "A battery can contaminate hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of water." Yes, there is such a danger, but unless these hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of water are completely stagnant water. As long as it is living water, it will be taken away by the water stream and diluted into the sea. How many dangers are there in finding tens of grams of toxic substances in tens of thousands of cubic meters of sea water?

The city's domestic garbage will be concentrated in the landfill. Landfills are far away from people and farms and farms. Waste batteries cannot be quickly and directly harmed to animals, plants and humans.

An explosion occurred in the waste battery warehouse in Shanghai. The reason is that a large number of waste batteries are piled up together, and multiple chemical reactions occur in the liquid flowing out. In the summer, the high-temperature closed environment in the warehouse causes an explosion.

Here is a news link, "Nanjing 6 years of collecting waste batteries to do useless work is allegedly fooling the public feelings." This is the only report I have seen over the years calling for not collecting waste batteries. But every year, I can see a lot of lazy media, copying and pasting old reports of collecting used batteries.

Protecting the environment means not to waste resources and not to pollute the environment. Not 100% waste free, not 100% pollution free. A car, from the mining of ore, to the purchase of it, to its retirement, the pollution of the environment, than the pollution of the waste battery you have used in your life, is dozens of times larger. To achieve 100% without waste or pollution, human beings can only return to the primitive society.

Waste batteries are not unique to China. Waste batteries are produced all over the world. How do they deal with them, especially in developed countries? The reporter interviewed relevant people and consulted relevant information.

Waste batteries have a negative impact on the environment (even if it is minor) mainly because they contain mercury. Therefore, developed countries began to control the mercury content in batteries earlier, advocated the development of a series of safe batteries that are conducive to environmental protection, and banned the production of batteries with mercury content greater than 0.025% of the weight of the battery. In the early 1990s, mercury-free batteries (with mercury content below 0.0001%) were realized in major developed countries.

In the battery management policy, the policies of developed countries can be summarized into two categories.

The first category is for ordinary dry batteries. The government requires manufacturers to gradually reduce the amount of mercury in the battery, and ultimately prohibits the addition of mercury to the battery. This requirement is part of the process of eliminating all mercury-containing products, not just the battery industry. Nowadays, almost all developed countries prohibit the addition of mercury to batteries.

The second type of policy is for rechargeable batteries. Legislation requires manufacturers to phase out cadmium-containing batteries. At present, nickel-hydrogen batteries and lithium batteries are gradually replacing nickel-cadmium batteries. In some countries, the Electronic Manufacturers Association has carried out the recycling of rechargeable batteries, and the effect is also remarkable. This is mainly because the total consumption of rechargeable batteries is relatively small (compared to ordinary dry batteries), the application range is small, it is easy to collect by trade-in, and the recovery value is high, so such waste battery collection is easier.

For the ordinary dry batteries that have been scrapped, no developed country has mandated centralized collection and processing. In the United States, Japan, and the European Union, ordinary dry batteries used by the people in their daily lives have not been treated as hazardous waste, and there is no law to separate the treatment of ordinary dry batteries. There is a stage in which some battery (s) industrial associations and individual cities in developed countries have organized collection activities of ordinary dry batteries, and their countries neither encourage nor restrict. At present, there are few activities in developed countries to recycle ordinary dry batteries separately. Instead, when collecting and disposing of domestic garbage, the waste batteries are collected separately.

A Japanese expert who came to China to participate in environmental protection academic activities once told the counterparts of the State Environmental Protection Administration that Fukuoka University in Japan has conducted 15 years of research, indicating that mercury-containing batteries can be land filled with domestic waste. The inference that waste batteries can cause water plague is unfounded. The water plague incident that occurred in Japan in 1959 was the mercury-containing lead-zinc mine that had been mined upstream for nearly a hundred years. It discharged a large amount of mercury-containing wastewater into a river for several decades, in the downstream water system. The accumulation of mercury is caused by it. The expert also stressed that the waste battery is objectively impossible to cause damage such as water logging.

Regarding the waste battery recycling plant, it is understood that there are factories in Japan and Switzerland that have been dealing with waste batteries. Originally, they mainly deal with ordinary waste batteries containing mercury, and now mainly deal with rechargeable batteries. Due to the small amount of waste batteries, some of the facility's production capacity is idle.

In Germany, the collected waste batteries are placed in abandoned pits for storage. Before using this method, environmental impact assessment of selected pits must be carried out, and special treatments such as leakage prevention and storage should be carried out. The experts interviewed suggest that this method can be used to deal with the waste batteries that have been collected in China.

The page contains the contents of the machine translation.