EU Proposing Mandatory Battery Recycling

Ironsides writes "The BBC Reports that the European Union is working on a directive to mandate battery recycling. Among other things, it will ban more than trace amounts of cadmium and mercury and require all batteries to be removeable. If it passes, it will be interesting to see how this affects such devices as MP3 players that generally do not have removeable rechargeable batteries."

Won't change much in appearance

[_merlin]

All that's going to happen is the manufacturers will provide a facility for you to return the device so they can remove the battery. I don't think the bill says batteries have to be user-removable, just removable.

This could potentially affect things like real-time clock chips, though. You'd either have to make the whole chip removable, or use an external battery. "Suicide batteries" in arcade game cartridges could also come under this.

As for banning cadmium - how will cordless power tools go? NiCd still performs better than NiMH or LiIon for high-current applications.

Duracell Bunny

[Animaether]

In the EU, they'd have to eye -this- little pink guy instead:
http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&lr= &q=Duracell+Bunny [google.com]

( no, not the same company at all - quite heavy competitors in the U.S. actually, though Duracell doesn't use their bunny in the U.S. I think )

Sounds good to me

[epp_b]

...and require all batteries to be removeable

Well, that part sounds good to me. I think it should be a law regardless of the environmental effect...

Re:iPod battery life problem

[DDLKermit007]

For the most part the iPod battery "thing" is people who's batteries died after 18 months. Of which, ALL li-ion batteries carry a shelf-life of 18 months so no fsking wonder they stopped working. Anything else is gravy. There really are not that many batteries outside of the usual 5-10 percentile of batteries that are expected to be bad, but those go in under 6 months and are covered by the Apple warranty anyways. PLUS, PLUS!!! li-ion batteries have a finite amount of charge cycles they can do (300-400 is the average. Maybe Apple put some higher quality ones in, but they won't last forever. For the most part the people bemoaning their iPod's batteries going out on them had it happen after their 12 month warranty ran out that's standard and were just too cheap to pay $60 for a 2 year warranty when they picked up the iPod. That lawsuit was based primarily on the 5-10 percentile of bad iPods which is ALLOT when your selling that many and the crack addict iPoders that end up charging their iPod twice a day.

Also Apple began doing their battery replacement program before the lawsuit was even filed. Plus the batteries had been available through other sources for quite a long time before that. They probably figured the 3rd party market would fill the gap as needed with all the other iPod needs (so they never got prepared to be "servicing" batteries), but apparently people were too stupid to figure it out (it's aparently eaisier to just jump onto class action lawsuit and guarantee prices go up for everyone). You'd probably know that though if you'd owned an iPod, laptop, or anything else that uses li-ion that goes through allot of charge cycles. I'm not defending Apple, but this is just the way it is with li-ion batteries. Apple serviced batteries as they should "in warranty." If people are too cheap to spend $60 protection more on a $300+ purchase it's their own damn fault imo.

And lastly I've gone through 2 iPods within the first year, but they were due to my own abuse. Death by chicken soup baptism and frieing it on a PC with a bad PSU. Shockingly because Apple is so bad about repairs they replaced it both times. I even told the guy about the chicken soup. I fully expected to be buying a new iPod that time.

Re:Non-removable batteries

[Fred_A]

Player makers could start a program like the one that exists for toner cartridges where you can mail your dead player for recycling for free.

I know that if my iRiver H320 died and I couldn't find a way to change the battery (unlikely given the number of dedicated battery stores on the web, but you never can tell), I'd consider several options :

• use it as an external USB2 disk, although 20 GiB isn't much it's better than a key drive
  
• extract the disk to upgrade my old Sony laptop and drop the batery in one of the numerous battery recycling boxes
  
• sell it on eBay as a collector item ??
  

People in Europe (the western bit at least) are quite sensitive to recycling issues so if they can (and they often can for the required infrastructure is gradually being put in place), they will recycle. The mindset is very different from what you'll find in the US.

Re:Not a bad idea

[Bullfish]

Actually, when I was a kid you could buy mercury duracells (they were red). It was a selling feature. You paid extra.

standardized LiIon battery?

[Gunstick]

I would wish that the Industry finally comes up with a standardized lithium-Ion Battery. In some form factor which enables it to be put on many types of devices. E.g. some sort of lego-type snap together or slide-on so if you want more capacity you just put more batteries.
Yes, not round cells but square ones. Why do batteries have to be round?