The Explosive Problem With Recycling Phones, Tablets and Other Gadgets: They Literally Catch Fire. (washingtonpost.com) 66
What happens to gadgets when you're done with them? Too often, they explode. From a report: Around the world, garbage trucks and recycling centers are going up in flames. The root of the problem: volatile lithium-ion batteries sealed inside our favorite electronics from Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and more. They're not only dangerous but also difficult to take apart -- making e-waste less profitable, and contributing to a growing recycling crisis. These days, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are in smartphones, tablets, laptops, ear buds, toys, power tools, scooters, hoverboards and e-cigarettes. For all their benefits at making our devices slim, powerful and easy to recharge, lithium-ion batteries have some big costs. They contain Cobalt, often mined in inhumane circumstances in places like the Congo. And when crushed, punctured, ripped or dropped, lithium-ion batteries can produce what the industry euphemistically calls a "thermal event." It happens because these batteries short circuit when the super-thin separator between their positive and negative parts gets breached.
Old devices end up in trouble when we throw them in the trash, stick them in the recycling bin, or even responsibly bring them to an e-waste center. There isn't official data on these fires, but the anecdotal evidence is stark. Since the spring of 2018 alone, batteries have been suspected as the cause of recycling fires in New York, Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin, Indiana, Idaho, Scotland, Australia and New Zealand. In California, a recent survey of waste management facilities found 83 percent had at least one fire over the last two years, of which 40 percent were caused by lithium-ion batteries.
Old devices end up in trouble when we throw them in the trash, stick them in the recycling bin, or even responsibly bring them to an e-waste center. There isn't official data on these fires, but the anecdotal evidence is stark. Since the spring of 2018 alone, batteries have been suspected as the cause of recycling fires in New York, Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin, Indiana, Idaho, Scotland, Australia and New Zealand. In California, a recent survey of waste management facilities found 83 percent had at least one fire over the last two years, of which 40 percent were caused by lithium-ion batteries.
Removable batteries. (Score:5, Insightful)
This problem is easy to solve, make a law that requires all batteries to be removable.
Re: Removable batteries. (Score:3)
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Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
How would this really solve the problem? I saw people throwing old batteries in the trash on the regular, for as long as I can remember.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
How would this really solve the problem? I saw people throwing old batteries in the trash on the regular, for as long as I can remember.
Require deposits on the batteries, that you get back when you turn them in to a recycler. $5-$10 per battery would go a long way to ensuring they were recycled without being overly burdensome on the consumer.
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$5-$10 per battery would go a long way to ensuring they were recycled without being overly burdensome on the consumer.
$5-10 per battery would be helpful and reasonable, but what of cells? I've got a flashlight that runs on 1x18650, what should I pay when I buy one of those cells?
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$5-$10 per battery would go a long way to ensuring they were recycled without being overly burdensome on the consumer.
$5-10 per battery would be helpful and reasonable, but what of cells? I've got a flashlight that runs on 1x18650, what should I pay when I buy one of those cells?
Same. It's a deposit. You get it back when you recycle the cell eventually. Ditto for the bombs...er...batteries in ecigs. Most people aren't running around with a ton of those types of cells so it's still not a burden. Of course there the challenge is dealing with all of them coming in direct to consumers from China.
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http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?431016-Another-pocket-fireworks!-(or-why-you-shouldn-t-carry-a-loose-lithium-battery) [candlepowerforums.com]
http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?262234-TK-Monster-Explosion [candlepowerforums.com]
These were 18650 cells.
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It doesn't solve the problem of people doing stupid things with batteries, but it definitely makes recycling device materials easier. It would also likely have a positive effect on how long people used their devices.
Hanging (Score:1)
>> I saw people throwing old batteries in the trash on the regular
Hanging those people solves the problem.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Because those old batteries were zinc and manganese oxide, neither of which is particularly valuable, and the electrolyte was potassium hydroxide, which is neither particularly valuable nor particularly flammable.
You could get some modest heat out of a semi-discharged 9V battery or, given enough time, some mild, acid-base reactions, but there's no high redox potential, flammable electrolyte glory to get a real bonfire going.
Same thing with lead acid batteries, except for the nastiness of dissolved lead contaminating groundwater and strong acids that will burn flesh.
NiCad are similar to the lead acid batteries. Heavy metal contamination problem, but no substantial ability to go up in a pyre.
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It's totally fine to throw away most Alkaline batteries: https://qz.com/331854/fyi-its-... [qz.com]
Most rechargeable batteries do need to be recycled properly. You are correct that a lot of people who don't care will still throw away their old phones with the battery still attached.
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The law would likely take several years before going into effect, which does nothing to help solve the problem in the intermediary period or for the large volume of existing gadgets.
The law does nothing to solv
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The law does nothing to address that people who aren't responsible enough to recycle their gadgets in the first place aren't going to be responsible enough to pull the battery before they ditch them or that they won't throw out batteries themselves when they age but the device is otherwise fine.
No, but it does mean that the people working at recycling centers can pull out the batteries for specialized handling.
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Exactly. It's not perfect, but nothing is. However, making the batteries easy to remove means they are more likely to be isolated from the rest of the material and can even be stored in fire-resistant containers for recycling etc..
It would also be nice to require that devices manufacturers no longer want to support are required to be provided with code and unlock keys so they can be re-used by makers etc.. Lots of old phones and such would be great for projects, but we can't use them because they are so loc
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I kind of recall Apple showing off a robot that could disassemble their iPhones a few years ago. I don't know if anything ever came of that, but that's essentially what you need if you want to have any hope of recycli
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The recycling process itself is expensive (and the materials recovered limited) and adding a person making even minimum wage to the mix makes it prohibitively so.
It is somewhat surprising that it is cheaper to dig deep into the ground, retrieve ore and extract minerals from said ore than it is to extract the minerals from a finished product. Worse, the price of recycling is placed on all of us through general taxation rather than requiring the producer to recycle the materials going into their products. That would add to the price of the product, making the consumer of the product being the one paying for it.
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Even the Chinese have started dumping e-waste since labor has become too expensive.
Seems like a good job for Africans or Haitians, at least until we get better robots.
Basic wages in Haiti are a tenth of China's.
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Maybe we should make a law against people proposing making simplistic laws to solve complex problems.
Yes, we should not attempt to do anything better unless it can be absolutely perfect.
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This problem is easy to solve, make a law that requires all batteries to be removable.
That solves a lot of problems, actually. Maybe some politician will grab this issue and do the right thing... hahaha, who am I kidding?
Tax solves that (Score:2)
Even better : modulate the already existing recycling tax on new devices with the degree of difficulty of the recycling !
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The market, in its majestic wisdom, will (by definition) fix the problem when just the right number of people die!
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This problem is easy to solve, make a law that requires all batteries to be removable.
Here's a few questions. Are we going to require the manufacturer to create replacement batteries? How do you enforce that? We can make them removable, now define "removable". The iPad battery in the article was removable, you just need a heating pad, screwdriver, a plastic pry bar, and about an hour.
Define the "battery". If you define it too broadly then the manufacturers can just define the device as the battery. Define it too tightly and each individual cell is a battery, and removing them means the
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It's really not that difficult. You just say it must be possible to remove the battery without use of any tools or significant effort, by an average person (not a specialist), in less than [x] seconds. Then you delegate responsibility for signing off on whether its complied with to the exact same bodies who already are responsible for product certification - the infrastructure for product certification is already there, so it's just adding another rule to be complied with before the product gets certified.
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It's really not that difficult. You just say it must be possible to remove the battery without use of any tools or significant effort, by an average person (not a specialist), in less than [x] seconds.
If the regulation is targeted, no manufacturer who cares about their reputation will dare oppose it given the obvious reasons for it and limited cost.
Except a manufacturer that brings up the theft risks of being able to remove a battery from a phone in seconds by an unskilled person without the need for tools. A phone can be tracked, locked, or whatever, a battery removed from the phone cannot. A battery removed from the phone has value, it can be sold as a replacement battery, if damaged or aged the it still has scrap material value, or valuable as a potential weapon if shorted out to make it burn or explode.
Yes, you'll never get absolutely everyone and the enforcement effort to get every last manufacturer and stop every last non-compliant import is not worth it - but if even 50% of the market complies, that's still a huge improvement on today's situation.
What improvement? These batteries have bee
Apple solved the problem already (Score:2)
Apple will take back any Apple product and recycle it, for free.
Require all other companies that sell products with batteries to do the same.
Doesn't that make WAY more sense than what you are proposing? How would your idea help any, when the device would just be thrown away with the battery still in it - in fact even worse, it would be thrown away with spare batteries!
So what you're saying is.... (Score:3)
...who needs WMDs to take down a plane? /h or /s, pick one
ALl you need is a bunch of old tech stacked together with a bad battery...and stand back?
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Some numbers? (Score:3)
Some numbers on how serious this problem really is would have been nice.
As an anecdote, I've been working at an outfit that recycles electronics here in the US, for about 3 years now. We've never had a fire from lithium batteries or any other battery.
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but the anecdotal evidence is stark.
Some numbers ... would have been nice. We've never had [one].
Stark, it's stark, they don't have much / any. Just hear-say rumors, that's all. That's *ALL* they've got, do you get me?
And be very nice to the man from Stark Industries when he comes around saying "... Shame if something were to happen here", else your outfit might start having lithium-ion battery fires, even in the Plastic-Only section.
Not a euphemism (Score:3)
can produce what the industry euphemistically calls a "thermal event."
what they are describing is not an euphemism... it's a literal... never in the history of the world has there been a better case for the use of the word "literal." It is literally a "thermal event."
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I received a warning letter once about the battery in an early smartphone. The letter warned me that this battery might "rapidly disassemble". You know, not explode, but rapidly disassemble. Lawyers ...
Use the system as intended (Score:2)
Path of least government.
Just my 2 cents
Smarter Faster, Smaller! (Score:2, Funny)
So, what the article is saying is that the smart phone industry, with their non-repairable form factor and replaceable batteries, is a dumpster fire?
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There's some hope... (Score:2)
Prediction (Score:2)
All the solutions in the comments will for the most part ignore the very fundamental issue that maybe these devices should not be considered disposable.
Our society seems to be shifting more and more to the disposable and away from the durable good. Why should I be buying new computers and cell phone every 2 years? Used to be you bought a PC, paid like 6K for inflation adjusted and you ran it for 6 or seven years! Sure that meant that you did not always have the latest and greatest. It was perfectly norma
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Why should I be buying new computers and cell phone every 2 years? Used to be you bought a PC, paid like 6K for inflation adjusted and you ran it for 6 or seven years!
A roughly mainstream desktop PC spec in 2012 would have been quad-core AMD Piledriver or Intel Sandy Bridge, probably 4GB RAM. That's still more than enough to run Windows 10 and Office 2016. Laptops similarly. Contrast that to the difference between 1988 and 1994 (for example). This is entirely an issue with phones/tablets, and is down to (1) the relative immaturity of those devices and (2) a pricing structure for phone contracts which incentivises "upgrades" every two years based on contract renewal.