<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/where-to-recycle-batteries-us-versus-europe/>
"In the suburb of Los Angeles where I lived for ten years, the local
supermarket shut down the last recycling machine within a ten-mile radius that
paid out cash for empty bottles. A handwritten note was taped to the unplugged
machine: UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES was it okay to leave any bottles there. WE
DON’T TAKE ANY BOTTLES BACK!!!!!
And of course, they don’t want my household batteries either.
It’s probably wrong to compare the small Bavarian village where I was raised
with life in a metropolis of 13 million people, but the difference in attitudes
toward recycling is hard to overstate. After I moved to California, the first
time I found myself with a pile of empty plastic containers and used batteries,
I naively took them back to the supermarket. When I tried to hand them over,
the bewildered cashier looked at me as if I were a Martian. I was equally
perplexed. In Germany, every store that sells bottles or batteries is obligated
to take them back for recycling.
Don’t get me wrong. I love living in the US, especially in coastal California,
which has pioneered some particularly strong environmental protections. But if
there was an Academy Award for recycling, Germany, not Hollywood, would take
home the Oscar. We Germans are taught to recycle from early childhood, so that
it simply becomes second nature. This is why Germany has a trash recycling rate
of 56 percent, while Americans recycle less than 35 percent. I cringe at the
daily heap of trash my partner and I (two adults, two dogs, no kids) manage to
create here, while in Germany, my parents easily fit two weeks worth of trash
into one small bin.
But I’m especially mad about the batteries. I am mentally and emotionally
incapable of throwing a AA or AAA battery into the trash. Doing so is illegal
in Germany, and while I may or may not have done a few illegal things growing
up, trashing batteries was never one of them because the EU’s 2006 battery
recycling mandatewas for good reason: The little beasts contain heavy metals
and acids that leach into groundwater and poison the environment. Moreover,
they are chock full of valuable resources (cadmium, mercury, nickel and
lithium, to name a few) that we badly need to recover."
We have battery recycling here in Melbourne, though not at the supermarket.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
