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Industry Scenario
People want an inexhaustible pool of energy in a package that is small, cheap, safe and clean, and the battery industry has fulfilled this desire of man. Rechargeable batteries play an important role in our life and many daily chores would be unthinkable without the ability to recharge an empty battery. Lead-acid battery accounts for half the demand of rechargeables. This battery is mainly used for automotive and stand-by applications. Because of low cost and dependable service in adverse environmental conditions, lead-acid battery sector enjoys a steady market growth.
Lead acid batteries are rechargeable batteries made of lead plates situated in a bath of sulfuric acid within a plastic casing. They are used in every country in the world. The batteries can be charged many times, but after numerous cycles of recharging, lead plates eventually deteriorate causing the battery to lose its ability to hold stored energy for any period of time. Once the lead acid battery ceases to be effective, it is unusable and deemed a used lead acid battery (ULAB), which is classified as a hazardous waste under the Basel Convention.
Recycled lead is a valuable commodity and the recovery of car and similar batteries can be a viable and profitable business. Therefore, the market for reclaiming secondary lead has been growing. Many units have entered the business of buying ULABs in bulk in order to recycle them for lead recovery. These ULABs are often shipped over long distances for recycling, typically from the industrialized countries that produce, use, and then collect the spent batteries for reprocessing. ULAB recycling and smelting operations are often located in densely populated urban areas with few pollution controls. In many cases the local recycling operations are not managed in an environmentally sound manner and release lead contaminated waste into the local environment.
These operations are often conducted by economically marginalized members of society, needing an additional source of income, but without any understanding of the risks involved. The informal process of recovering secondary lead from the ULABs includes breaking the batteries manually and using archaic melting operations to recover and sell the secondary lead to the large processors. Despite efforts by regulatory agencies and the industry to bring safer and more efficient practices into the recycling process ignorance of the risks of lead contamination combined with a lack of viable economic alternatives has led the industry to continue in this manner.
