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Recycling car batteries
Are
you worried about recycling car batteries? How can you be sure that
you car battery is recycled? Well, if you replace your car battery
at a service center, then they will take care of it for you. On
the other hand, if you are replacing it yourself, you can take your
old battery to the store where you bought your new one, and they
should take care of it for you.
Recycling car batteries – or, at least, making sure that
they make it to the recycling center – is relatively easy
for a consumer. Therefore, you really need to make sure that it
gets done! Car batteries, if thrown into a junkyard or discarded
elsewhere, can be very dangerous to the environment.
Because of this danger, recycling car batteries is very important.
So, what is it about car batteries that make them so dangerous?
They seem perfectly safe when they are powering your vehicle, right?
Well, the batteries that you use in your car are lead-acid batteries.
This means that the inside of the battery are sheets of lead metal
in sulfuric acid.
If your battery has any leaks, it can cause very severe chemical
burns if it chances to come in contact with your skin or eyes. And,
as you can imagine, the components of lead-acid batteries are very
harmful to the environment, as well.
Fortunately, people have begun to realize the harmful affects that
lead-acid batteries can cause to the environment. This does not
mean that companies have stopped making lead-acid batteries. (After
all, this kind of battery is easy to manufacture, easy to charge,
low cost, and provides a high voltage.) Rather, the recycling of
car batteries has become the norm.
Virtually all car batteries are recycled these days. No one simply
discards them like they used to. Nobody wants toxic lead floating
around the environment!
These days, about 60% of the world’ lead supply comes from
recycled car batteries. Recycling car batteries has become the norm,
and the environment thanks us for it.
People are even finding very creative ways of recycling car batteries.
In fact, KI even makes a chair called the “Daylight”
chair that is made from both recycled car batteries (from the plastic
casings… not the lead!) and old safety belts.
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