1000 Flowers for the Planet - #403 Recycle Batteries

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #403 Recycle Batteries

Flowers #194 (Use Rechargeable Batteries) and #280 (Recycle Car Batteries) have already talked about the impacts of batteries on the environment, but let’s take another, serious look at what batteries cost the planet. Initially, they use finite resources such as metals, steel, zinc, manganese, potassium, cobalt, paper and plastic. These resources have to be dug up from the earth and transported to a factory where the manufacturing process occurs. Batteries are then put into packaging – paper and plastic – to be transported to the point of sale, where you pay for them and transport them home. There’s a lot of energy (fossil fuels) being used in this process, as well as air, water and land pollution, greenhouse gasses, deforestation, erosion and habitat loss for wild species.

Once the life of the battery is extinct, via your use, your instinct is to toss it ‘away’, but putting it into landfill is merely damaging the environment further. If put into landfill, batteries will eventually leach toxic chemicals into the soil where they then seep into our water systems and pollute the environment. Human health risks include pulmonary, respiratory and neurological problems – all undesirable. Further to this, thousands of other species are affected.

Hopefully, this will be enough information to convince everyone to recycle batteries (if you can’t do without them altogether), but you can certainly gather a lot more information, plus recycling ‘how to’ at www.batteryrecycling.org.au or search for places within your own country.