It may keep our electronics going and going, but batteries are creating quite a mess here in Canada.
In a story by the Canadian Press, Environment Canada says consumers are throwing out millions of batteries containing toxic chemicals that threaten health and the environment.
The report says the number is increasing due to the growing prevalence of gadgets that use batteries. Canadians will throw out nearly 500 million batteries a year by 2010, up from 347 million in 2004, the study says.
Our home and native land remains far behind Europe in regulations to ensure safe battery recycling. I guess we need all those batteries for all those remote controls.
But wait. There's good news. Check out Earth 911. In fact, send the link to all of your friends. It's a fantastic resource for all you recyclers out there. They even have a list of battery recycling locations.
Finally, Mountain Equipment Co-Op now recycles things like cell phones and ink cartridges. Nice!
Susan Antler
Whether this is the right thing for me to do for my job or not, I have a personal need to respond to what has been written in the headline and opening sentence of this last entry.... especially as this is a blog coming from an environmental organization that I respect.
Fourteen years ago, I was hired to help form a new association whose only focus was to co-ordinate the environmental efforts of a specific industry ... and the industry was (and continues to be) the household battery industry in Canada.
I was totally excited. My love for the environment (and in particular, whales) had resulted in me changing career paths in the late-1980s. I was now being given the opportunity to work for an industry group and get them on the "green path."
What I quickly learned as I started my job was that they were already well along this path and that I had to run to catch up to them.
Fourteen years ago, the members of the Canadian household battery industry had given themselves 3 specific environmental mandates:
- eliminate the use of mercury in alkaline and other household batteries;
- discontinue batteries that contained mercury when other alternatives become available;
- introduce a recycling program for Nickel-Cadmium rechargeable batteries.
By January 1996, the first two mandates had been accomplished. Mercury was no longer used in the manufacturing of alkaline and carbon-zinc batteries and mercuric oxide button cells were discontinued, replaced with a zinc air alternative.
In January 1996, implementing the Nickel-Cadmium battery recycling program remained a challenge. The challenge wasn't that industry didn't want to step up to do this. The challenge was that government couldn't believe an industry would voluntarily come to the table in advance of regulation and any other stick that could be waved.
It was an incredible time for me. Here was a group of companies who wanted to do the right thing and my government wasn't eager to be of help.
-snip-