Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ryukoposting 181 days ago
A good recycling program sounds like a tall order. I'm seeing Silver nanoparticles (heavy metal) and multiple things that react violently with water.

I'm always skeptical of any idea that ends with a bespoke industrial-scale recycling process. People tend to massively underestimate the complexity of recycling, especially at scale.
1 comments
gmueckl 181 days ago
In general, bespoke recycling processes can make sense, especially if you manage to design the items to recycle with the recycling process in mind. There are several types of goods where this is put into practice (paper, compounds like TetraPak packages, various polymer plastics). Not sure about all the differrent types of batteries, though.
link
ryukoposting 181 days ago
We struggle to recycle normal batteries without injuring or killing people. Lead-acid batteries contain literal plates of lead oxides, and we can't manage to keep that out of the water supply! I don't see how we'd do any better with silver nanoparticles.

Nothing I'm saying is meant to condemn recycling as a concept, by the way. Only to condemn technologies where disposal is dismissed with a shrug and a "idk just recycle it."

link
cogman10 181 days ago
> we can't manage to keep that out of the water supply!

AFAIK, the lead in the water supply doesn't come from batteries. It mostly comes from lead pipes. Lead acid battery recycling is one of the more efficient recycling programs out there.

link
ryukoposting 180 days ago
"efficient" and "clean" aren't the same thing, and they never have been.

Recycling lead-acid batteries is extremely efficient. Nearly the entire battery by mass is recovered.

But, it also causes severe lead pollution around recycling sites. Lead acid battery recycling is one of the leading causes of lead poisoning around the world [1]. Estimations vary, but all generally agree that millions of human-years of life have been lost due to lead pollution caused specifically by lead-acid battery recycling. [2]

[1]: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-0-387-77030-7_...

[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5990833/

Returning to the original point, recycling anything involving heavy metals is extremely difficult to do without poisoning people. If we can't avoid it with one of the simplest, dumbest battery technologies in regular use today, I don't see how we're going to avoid it with a battery technology involving heavy metal nanoparticles.

link
cogman10 180 days ago
My reading of both those reports isn't that lead can't be safely recycled without contamination, but rather that countries with low regulations and oversight aren't recycling lead batteries in a safe manor.

In fact, the second link is more about the problem with using smelting to recycle lead. That requires a lot of power and thus emits a lot of CO2.

Is it the case that lead acid batteries are being primarily recycled through exports?

link