Battery Recycling in North America Cominco (owner of the Trail BC smelter) estimates that in the US alone 93,000,000 SLI (starting, lighting, ignition) batteries were sold in 1997. This number is growing at a rate of 2.5 to 3% annually. Those figures do NOT include other battery types such as "traction" batteries (fork lifts, electric vehicles, golf carts) and "stationary" batteries (submarines, locomotives, uninterruptable power supplies, Telephone company backup, repeaters, transmitters, remote data gathering stations, buoys etc.). It is likely that the number of non-SLI batteries in the US is in the 10's of millions as well. Overall 85% of the 1,300,000 tonnes of lead production in the US goes into the manufacture of batteries. That is approximately 1,100,000 tonnes (or nearly 2.5 billion pounds of lead) annually. Now, batteries also contain sulphuric acid...a rather toxic and hazardous substance. An average car battery holds about one US gallon of acid. Larger, industrial batteries hold much more. By using US Environmental Protection Agency's estimate that the acid makes up 18% of a battery's weight, one can calculate that annual consumption of sulphuric acid for battery manufacturing is 360,000,000 litres or roughly 100,000,000 US gallons (this figure is probably quite conservative, but it still represents a lot of acid!). SLI batteries last about 1 year in extreme hot climates and about 5 yr in temperate ones... it would probably be safe to say that about 33% of the batteries in the US are replaced annually. This means that the number of batteries in service is about 3 times the annual production... or roughly 1/3 of a billion SLI batteries. This isn't even counting any of the other lead-acid battery types, AND this is only the number for the USA. One lead producer (Doe Run, Missouri... the largest lead smelter in the US) estimates that 95% of batteries in America are recycled. That sounds great except for three things: 5%, or about 4.5 million batteries are not recycled... that means they end up is landfill sites, or just sitting around until they fall apart and begin to contaminate soil and water. That is 125,000,000 pounds of lead and about 5,000,000 gallons of sulphuric acid that are being dumped into the environment annually! Lead recycling is not quite the environmentally friendly exercise that it sounds like. First, the acid has to be emptied out of the batteries and neutralized. Next, the lead has to be removed from the case and shipped to a smelter (and there aren't many of those in the US)...that takes energy. The neutralized acid and case scrap have to be disposed of. And finally the lead itself has to be resmelted, and that not only takes energy, it also introduces more lead into the environment in the form of dust, and fine particulates from stack losses. Lead is an extremely toxic substance. We have gone to great effort to remove it from paint, plumbing and plumbing solder, glazes on ceramics, toothpaste tubes, soldered seams on tin cans, and cast toys for children. It is a cumulative poison (which means that over time levels build up in the human body) Ingested or inhaled lead first goes into the blood, then is deposited in bones and teeth. Blood levels of than 10 micrograms per 100 ml are considered toxic. Lead causes anemia, kidney malfunction, brain damage, growth impairment, and probably cancer (source: US Health Protection Agency). Although US smelters are constantly reducing their emissions and operate under legislated standards, that is not the case throughout the rest of the world, and especially not in third world countries where few environmental restrictions apply and smelting technology is less advanced. The relevance of this last point to the US market is not immediately apparent, but becomes clearer when the figures for lead production are examined. In recent years annual US lead production is approximately 1,300,000 tonnes, of which 23% is primary (i.e. mined) and 77% (or 1,000,000 tonnes) is recycled. The Doe Run Smelter is the largest one in the US and it only produces 82,000 tonnes of recycled lead (8% of the US total). The Cominco smelter at Trail BC (the largest lead smelter in Canada) produced 108,100 tonnes of lead last year, 42% of which came from "other sources" in North and South America. Even if all of this 45,400 tonnes was waste lead from the US, sent to Trail for recycling and shipped back to the states, that, along with the Doe Run production only accounts for 13% of the US recycled lead total. It seems logical to assume, therefore, that most recycled lead in the US comes from offshore sources. It is also a fairly safe bet to assume that pollution standards at these offshore recycling facilities are less stringent than in the United States, and that lead is being introduced into the environment at these offshore locations. The obvious conclusions that can be drawn from all of this is are: Extend the life of batteries with CanPULSE technology. This will reduce the number of batteries that we need to recycle each year. Recycle ALL batteries and scrap lead. Don't ship our pollution problems to someone else. Deal with them at the source. Back to the Information page or Back to the Environment page