People Send 20 Billion Pounds of 'Invisible' E-Waste To Landfills Each Year - Sl...

Posted by BeauHD

• ›

  either batteries are disposable or rechargeable, they are not both. or rather they are not designed to be both. Your modern rechargeable battery chemistry is not meant to go into a landfill, and sadly there is little infrastructure for properly reclaiming the materials from these cells. Processing the cells and recycling only 5% on average is not really sustainable, and the processing is very energy intensive as the black mass of toxic waste has to be separated. Maybe one day we'll have the technology for o

  • Re:

    You apparently never watch bigclivedotcom youtube channel. Those disgusting e-vape devices, as a example, come with rechargeable lithium batters with no way to recharge them, designed for single use to become landfill

  • Re:

    Single use batteries are not supposed to go to the landfill either. All batteries, rechargeable or not, are e-waste.

• We go through a stupid amount of AA batteries; we are using about 160 at a time in pairs. Rechargeable isn't viable because the charging frequency and effort is just insane. I wanted to hard-wire them, but they are in places with no nearby electricity. I contemplated ganging them into clusters of 4-10 and using a single bigger battery, but that is still pretty hard to do.

  I tried to be responsible and collect them for recycling. No luck on recycling; there are no local resources for it. The best you can do is pay to have them disposed of as hazardous waste. The municipal waste system says just throw them in the trash; the (waste to energy) incinerator will take care of them.

  And this is a product that is standardized and should easily be recyclable! Good luck expecting someone to be able to properly address consumer electronics beyond what is bulky and easy to hand off.

  • 1 hidden comment

  • Re:

    I do not understand

    you say you use AA alkalines. Okay.

    You say that rechargables are not viable because "the charging frequency and effort is insane". That is where you lose me.

    In the following I am making the assumption that the process of replacing the alkalines in the device is the exact same as the rechargables.

    Alkaline: once a pair needs replacement you need to
    1) go to storage to get new pair
    2) go to device to replace spent with new
    3) go to storage to place spent pair
    4) return to initial location

    Recharg

    • Re:

      If internal discharge is the issue, most NiMH batteries kinda suck compared to alkalines. The one notable exception is Sanyo Eneloop, but the trade-off there is that you lose about 20% of total capacity (2000 mAh vs. 2500 for AA). Confusingly, there are "black Eneloops" that give you the higher capacity, but they give up the low internal discharge that makes Eneloops special and (IMHO) water down the value of the branding.

      If the discharge rate is extremely low, old carbon pile "heavy duty" batteries from th

• Not likely. People understand what e-waste is. It's just far easier, and many times a lot cheaper, to toss it in the trash bin than try and figure out how to properly dispose of it.

  If there was a bin for e-waste like there is for recycling and trash in many places, you'd have a lot less e-waste mixed into landfills with general trash. Not sure what you'd do with it, but at least it would be pre-sorted.

  • Re:

    It may even be perfectly legal to do so. I was surprised to learn recently that my state - Washington, which considers itself to be very progressive - has a dirty little secret: Despite numerous programs designed to get people to segregate electronic waste from other garbage, disposing of electronic waste in the ordinary trash is not actually illegal here. So when you're faced with the choice of tossing that old microwave oven in the heap at the landfill, or paying them $60 to make a special trip and come p

    • 1 hidden comment

• E-cig vapes are a real problem, I agree, but some of these are nonsense. In my opinion USB cables aren't e-waste. What are you going to do with some worthless copper-clad aluminum wire and a broken connector? Same goes for most broken electronic toys and gadgets. Unless it has a battery, motor, or hefty transformer in it, what possible value could there be in recycling it? Let's be transparent here and give some real guidelines, please.

  And by the way, if you're just going to ship it to India to be burned, I'd rather it just be landfilled.

  • Recycling is generally worthless

    Which is why you need to ban the sale of electronics built to fail. This is the kind of problem you have to cut off at the source.

  • Re:

    Any item with lead solder used inside should be recycled. Not so much to recover the materials for economic reuse but to keep it out of the environment. Lead is present in nature but not concentrated like in landfills directly above many aquifers that are used in areas near the landfill.

    Anything with lead solder or lead materials (lead crystal glass, TV tubes, cast lead toys, etc) should be recycled or handled as hazardous waste. One USB cable might seem insignificant but 1000 USB cables, LED light bulbs

• A good start would be enacting laws that allow batteries to be easily replaced in electronics and for electronics to be easily repairable and supported by the manufacturer for a minimum of ten years. It's insane that three year old and even newer electronics are being scrapped because of huge difficulties in both of these areas. For those that are going to whine, "but ma' thin phone", fine, you want electronics that become throw away after a few years, you pay 20% more up front that can be redeemed as a cor

• In other news, the excessive recycling of stories on Slashdot continued unabated, with billions of clicks wasted each year when the editors didn't care enough to read their own website and filter out duplicates.

  One longtime Slashdot reader even went so far as to write a self-referential tragi-comic comment in the vain attempt to reduce such events, with the full knowledge that this too would be doomed to failure.