There's No Battery Graveyard. . .
They're reincarnated instead.

Did you know that 80 million lead-acid batteries are disposed of each year in the United States alone? If these power sources for cars, boats, lift trucks and other vehicles went straight to landfills, North America would run out of disposal sites, and there would be a serious environmental threat to the continent's groundwater.

Fortunately, the situation is far from grim. More than 95% of lead-acid batteries are currently being recycled. To find out what happens next to your spent lift truck batteries, Material Handling Solutions spoke with John Tapper of Gopher Resource Corp. (GRC), an Eagan, Minn., lead-recycling facility.

"Usually the company supplying batteries will take them back when you buy a replacement battery," Tapper explains. The "reincarnation process" starts when that supplier sells the spent battery to a recycler.

"Today's battery recyclers aren't the 'mom-and-pop' operations that sprang up from the scrap business years ago," he points out. "Lead-acid batteries are recycled in state-of-the-art facilities designed to ensure that no harmful wastes are released into the environment."

These recycling companies are much larger than in former days, too. GRC, for instance, needs to process 45 truckloads of batteries a day to fully utilize its plant.

After a truck arrives and is weighed, used batteries are unloaded and sent to a totally enclosed, automated and computer-controlled raw materials processing center. Here, the polypropylene or plastic casing is removed, cleaned and shredded into small chips for further recycling. Eventually, the plastic is remade into anything from screen doors to videocassette cases to more battery casings.

The individual battery cells are removed and other battery components are separated. "We recycle the steel cell casing, the acid and the lead," Tapper says.

Acid is collected and neutralized in a carefully monitored treatment system to render it harmless. "The lead, of course, is the most valuable component of an industrial lead-acid battery," he explains. "When a battery no longer works effectively and all its components have weakened, the lead is still good."

This lead heads to the smelter, where it's chemically changed from lead oxide into a molten metal. "From 100-ton refining kettles, the molten lead is cast into individual 70-lb. bars or 1-ton blocks," Tapper notes.

GRC's customers use the recycled lead to make many things, including wheel weights, X-ray shielding, sporting goods or, more than likely, new batteries.

"It's really a closed-loop system where spent batteries are a valuable, recoverable resource to us," Tapper says. "Our end product goes back to manufacturers for the creation of new batteries. Currently, about 60% of new car and industrial batteries come from recycled ones. That's a much higher percentage than in the aluminum, iron, paper, glass and plastic industries."

The process is also very efficient. "Often we can reuse as much as 99% of the original materials," he emphasizes. "We in the lead-acid battery recycling business are proud that we can contribute to a safer environment, cleaner landfills and resource conservation."