Lead Acid Car Battery Reuse

January 15, 2009 -- Filed under My impact by Andrew Macdonald

A story in the World section of the January 4, 2009 Chronicle Herald raised a few concerns which I thought had already been taken care of. What really does happen to my battery when it fails and is replaced with a new unit? What, I asked, were we doing in Canada to close the loop on our spent lead acid car batteries? Was it up to world standards as I had always assumed?

After digging through the available literature and resource guides, I satisfied my curiosity. You could say we’re doing an admirable job of recovering used batteries for reuse in this country, approaching 90% recovery. I also now better understand the general trend in the automobile industry towards a system of full resource recovery. That is, the reuse of all materials going into the production of the final product. As an example, this short video from Discovery Channel provides a window into the recovery of our used batteries and raises serious concerns about the 10% of batteries we do not recover. Where do they end up?

The video does a great job of explaining a very toxic and complicated process, while quietly suggesting that tossing batteries into the environment is an enormously destructive practice. After viewing this clip, the Herald article on lead poisoning from battery recycling in the third world became all that more relevant.

In the African village detailed in the story from the Jan. 4 Herald article, women have been dismantling batteries by hand for years. There is no recycling facility. No safety measures. No enforced health regulations.

Contrast all of this with the NRCAN definition (enforcement) of the regulated Canadian battery recycling process:

The main features of the recycling process include: Separation of the metallic lead and plastic components in a hydrodynamic separator, isolating the various components due to their density differences. In water, polypropylene floats, lead sinks and separator material and ebonite overflow to a vibrating screen. The water used in the hydrodynamic separator is collected in settling tanks for reuse.

Next time I’m at the repair shop for a battery, I’ll be sure to ask my service advisor about where the old one is headed!

For a detailed discussion on the use of lead in automobiles, the folks at the cleancarcampaign.org offer an array of alternatives, solutions and a glimpse of automobile manufacturing in the near future. Ecocenter has also this pdf about batteries.

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