Requirements by the Batteries Directive dictate that as of January this year, battery producers must pay for the collection, treatment and recycling of batteries in proportion to their market share. To do so, they must register with ?one of six battery compliance schemes that will arrange this on their behalf. ?Since the first of February, retailers of more than 32 kilogrammes (kg) of household batteries per year (the equivalent of one pack of four AA batteries a day) must offer an ?in-store take-back service. The new regulations aim to bump up the UK’s battery recycling rates from a dismal three per cent to 10 per cent by the year’s end, 25 per cent by 2012 and 45 per cent by 2016. Though the UK was slow to transpose the 2006 EU directive, Michael Green, Managing Director of G&P Batteries in Wolverhampton, is delighted that we’re finally facing up to the challenge of battery recycling. “We’ve worked very hard trying to influence recycling rates,” he says. “So we’re extremely happy these regulations have come to pass.” G&P Batteries, formed in 1977, is one of only four sites in the UK approved to treat waste portable batteries, so the new regulations mark big changes for the company. As well as an expected increase in feedstock and a reshuffling of its customer base due to the introduction of compliance schemes, changes to the very nature of battery sorting and recycling are at hand. “Now we have to categorise every battery as automotive, industrial or portable,” says Green, gesturing towards the rows of large bins that contain the 35,000 tonnes of batteries the facility takes in every year. “In terms of sorting batteries, we have to do everything by chemistry, but the regulations have no interest in that, so now we first have to categorise by application. It’s not a problem, but it’s an added measure.”After the batteries have been categorised, they’re sorted manually by chemistry type to determine recycling routes. “In tonnage terms, lead-acid is the biggest because car batteries are lead-acid, forklift truck batteries are lead-acid; they’re big, chunky things that account for 80 to 90 per cent of the volume we deal with,” explains Green. “But aside from lead-acid batteries there’s a huge variety, albeit in smaller tonnages. The most common ones include zinc-based batteries, alkaline, nickel-cadmium, nickel-metal hydride, lithium-ion, lithium primary, silver-oxide and mercuric-oxide.” And all of these varieties, Green notes, have to be sorted manually: “There’s no automatic process in the world that allows mixed batteries to be sorted in any meaningful way. AA batteries, for example, all have the same physical qualities, and often we’ll stumble across an unusual battery that no machine could be programmed to identify.”Inside G&P’s facility are a number of conveyor belts where teams of sorters carefully pick through the portable batteries, putting each into its corresponding bin or bucket. The emphasis certainly is on ‘carefully’, because as Green illustrates by poking a rogue plastic milk carton, the containers of mixed batteries are often peppered with other, much more dangerous waste, including bullets, shot-gun cartridges and hypodermic needles. “Most of the sorting is done by markings. The team here has built up a lot of skill in recognising them. But we still have guidance everywhere,” he says, pointing to the large, colour-coded charts that adorn the walls. “We also get a reasonable amount of WEEE amongst the containers, capacitors and some garage waste. We’ve got a route for all of that and throw away as little as we can.”To ensure cost efficiency, sorted batteries only continue their recycling journey once G&P can pack vehicles full of them. Green anticipates that the extra feedstock will yield two loads of alkaline batteries a week, whereas lithium batteries, which account for around just one per cent of the battery waste stream, might only create two loads a year. Where the batteries then go depends on their chemistry, as well as factors including customer requests and the standard of recycling efficiency required – while the majority of lead-acid batteries head to a lead smelter in Derbyshire, G&P uses over 10 facilities in more than four countries. Insofar as the actual recycling is concerned, there are, Green outlines, two main methods: “The most general way of recycling batteries is through a pyrometallurgical process. After the batteries have been ground up, they’re put in a furnace with specific agents and other materials to create a thermal reaction that brings about physical and chemical transformations, enabling the recovery of specific metals. The other process is hydrometallurgy, where the ground-up material is dissolved in acid, or water with added agents, to recover the valuable metals.”While most batteries can be recycled either way, Green is quick to note that lithium batteries – powerful batteries favoured for demanding appliances like digital cameras – can prove problematic. “It’s difficult to recover a lot of material from lithium batteries,” he says. “And one of the key issues we encounter is making them safe: I’ve seen a film where a D-cell battery – the kind you get in a torch – exploded in a two-storey portacabin and blew the roof completely off. It’s estimated they explode with two-thirds the power of TNT.” Lithium batteries are consequently a massive fire hazard, as Green himself knows all too well, since G&P suffered a large warehouse fire some 18 months ago. Even the world’s main lithium battery recycling facility in Canada, which recycles batteries in liquid nitrogen, recently experienced a huge fire. “Nobody is immune from this,” warns Green. “When a battery is flat we tend to regard it as being useless, but it’s important you continue to treat them with respect, or else you’ll have problems.”Volatile chemistries aside, the merits of, and differences between, pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy are hotly debated. Hydrometallurgy is a cleaner process, as pyrometallurgy creates atmospheric gases and slag (which can prove hazardous). Hydrometallurgy also recovers a much higher proportion of materials than pyrometallurgy. As Green explains: “If you set the furnace to recover, say, the steel and manganese in an alkaline battery, the zinc tends to disappear. If you dissolve it all and treat it chemically, you’ll get everything.”So why bother with pyrometallurgy at all? “Simply put, it’s much cheaper,” says Green. “But it does raise questions of recycling efficiency. Everyone has been so focused on compliance and collection targets that efficiency hasn’t really been considered. Europe’s Technical Adaptation Committee (TAC) will meet in March to hopefully ascertain what efficiency standard we need to achieve, and so until then the UK can’t really invest in any battery recycling processes.” Under the directive, by September 2011 batteries must be recycled to between 50 and 75 per cent of their weight to qualify as being recycled efficiently, so TAC must decide how these efficiencies are determined. If a low recycling efficiency standard is set, pyrometallurgy will continue to dominate the industry and, as Green says: “We’ll end up with the cheapest possible recycling options that negate the environmental benefits of recycling batteries.” However, if a higher standard is set, hydrometallurgy becomes more feasible and cost-effective as pyrometallurgy is much weaker in the face of stringent recovery targets. But recovery targets remain far from the forefront of the industry’s consciousness. For now, it’s all about collection rates, and as Green notes: “It’s great that these regulations have been implemented, and I can see us making the 2010 targets, but beyond that, I’m not sure. One of the reasons the UK is falling behind the rest of Europe in battery recycling is because we haven’t yet put the effort into making sure the public know why it’s so important, so we need to work on that to make sure we can hit post-2010 targets.”