Lead the Charge

The battery manufacturers went to work. They needed mercury (and lead) in the zinc amalgam that was used in batteries to fight galvanic corrosion. Otherwise, the battery tends to eat itself. You may be asking, "But Bob, what the heck is an amalgam?" Let's take a side route here for a minute because this is an important concept: When metal alloys include mercury, they don’t melt everything together in a smelter like with other alloys. They just dissolve powdered metals in liquid mercury. "Silver" dental fillings are a blend of powdered metals mixed into an equal amount of mercury. It remains fairly stable for something that is 50% mercury, but not without some slight leakage. People with these fillings die with more mercury in their kidney and brain tissues than people without them, and children with dental amalgam fillings have a higher concentration of mercury in their urine. Our country’s crematories release an estimated 19,000 pounds of mercury per year by burning humans with dental amalgams. I’m not saying that it is the only source – my mother used to put a solution of 25% mercury on my boo-boos (Mercurochrome) – this mercury is coming from somewhere, and it correlates well with dental amalgam use.

The effect of mercury on nerve tissue has been demonstrated in laboratory observations.

We know from this and studies like it that mercury isn't very good for you.

In the early 90's, we assessed our progress. Although US manufacturers had drastically reduced mercury in batteries, it just wasn't enough. The contribution from municipal solid waste was still six times greater than the next biggest (coal fired plants), and batteries still contributed 35% of the mercury to municipal solid waste (21% of all emission sources). Where could it be coming from? The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection speculated in their Report that foreign imports were responsible for 82% to 94% of the mercury in the battery waste stream in the United States, "…because many foreign manufactures may not have reduced the mercury content of their batteries to the same degree as U.S. firms".

The battery manufacturers were forced to come up with a solution or be regulated as hazardous or universal waste; one of the first product stewardship initiatives in the U.S. Their solution was to commit to continually reduce added mercury in alkaline and heavy duty batteries and develop a collection and recycling programs for batteries that have sufficient intrinsic value to make recycling cost-effective.

We’ve come a long way from D-cell batteries with 10 grams of mercury (if 4 mg can contaminate 7000 gallons of water, then 10 grams would contaminate 17.5 million gallons) to where we are today, but I still wince when municipalities encourage residents to "throw alkaline and heavy duty cells out with the regular trash":

1. We buy an awful lot of toys and electronic devices with batteries included – they aren't usually made here where it's regulated.
2. The regulation never really got to the lead component of the amalgam, so batteries could still be sold with enough lead to make them hazardous waste, even if all of the mercury is removed.
3. At best, non-rechargeable batteries are non-hazardous by regulation only. Because the electrolyte material is contained within the cell in a "dry" form, pH of the water that it is dissolved in is indeterminable. That doesn't have anything to do with other measures, like aquatic toxicity.

I wish there was a simple solution. If your household waste is headed for incineration, or energy recovery, or the backyard burn barrel, PLEASE separate the batteries and at least take them to the landfill with the ashes. Batteries contribute 12 times the mercury to the environment through combustion than landfill sources.