Usefully Useless

This post will focus on a large source of highly polluting chemical waste which households generate largely through incompetence.

No, not Gordon Brown’s underwear, but batteries. Disposing of them is difficult and highly polluting and most people spend more money on them and generate more chemical waste than they need to.

It’s almost a scandal that battery companies go to great lengths to avoid disclosing the actual capacities of their batteries. I’m yet to see a primary cell (non-rechargeable) state its capacity in either packaging or on the unit itself. All rechargeables state their capacity both on packaging and on the cells.

We measure capacity in milliamp-hours (mAh), a battery with a capacity of 1,000 mAh can deliver 1,000 milliamps for one hour, or 100 milliamps for ten hours.

Zinc Chloride

The first kind of battery, and the most common, is also the least suitable for almost everything. It’s the zinc chloride battery, also known as “heavy duty”, “extra heavy duty” and “super heavy duty”. They’re the ones you can buy at markets and get 20 for £1.

They typically have capacities around 300 to 700 mAh for AA size. They’re the biggest selling batteries and also by far the most expensive, both in terms of your wallet and in terms of environmental impact.

A pack here, labelled “Panasonic” and in red and black have a 670 mAh capacity as measured by me and cost me £2.99 for 12. That’s a total capacity of 8,040 mAh or 2,689 per pound.

Zinc chlorides are best suited for shop shelves and worst suited for any electrical device. They’re especially bad suited for lighting (e.g. flashlights, torches) and cameras, especially digital cameras. The capacity of a zinc chloride in a digital camera may be as low as 100 mAh.

Price per 1,000 mAh: 37.2p

Alkaline

Alkalines have very high capacities, usually 2,000 to 3,000 mAh for an AA cell, but are also a little more expensive. They’re always labelled as “Alkaline” somewhere.

A pack of 12 AA alkalines from Boots in black with orange text and Boots own brand will set you back £6.84 and I measured them to 2,400 mAh each. That’s a total capacity of 28,800 mAh or 4,211 per pound, around half the price of the zinc chlorides above.

Alkalines are best suited for remote controls, flashlights and torches, kids toys, and almost any other electrical appliance. They’re not suited for digital cameras, the high power draw of a digital camera reduces an alkaline’s capacity to around a quarter of what it should be.

Price per 1,000 mAh: 23.8p

Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH)

These are rechargeable batteries and vary in capacity from those cheap Energizer things in Tescos at 1,300 mAh to the more expensive 2,500 mAh units which can be bought from electrical stores.

Some places still sell nickel cadmium batteries, which have capacities much lower, often around 400 – 800 mAh. They’re still a fairly good deal and I’ll include them in the final cost summery.

The single most important thing to do is to buy a smart charger, these are often marketed as “intelligent”, “smart” or “automatic”. The number one cause of rechargeable battery death is overcharging. If you don’t have one and can’t yet get one, then undercharge; You’ll do no harm.

A pack of four 2,100 mAh cells set me back £8.49 and they’re rated for 1,000 cycles, improving their life to an “effective” 2,100,000 mAh. Of course their capacity does decline in time, reaching about 75% of its initial capcity before the battery fails completely. So I’m going to list them as 1,800,000. I’m also going to add the price of a four-cell fast smart charger (two hours charge for most batteries, four hours for these) at £12.99.

For the NiCd batteries, I picked up a set of four 800 mAh cells with their own charger (not a smart charger, but the instructions were clear enough as to how long to charge for) for £4.99 from the local Netto.

Of course the price of mains electricity is a factor, so I’ll include that too. 1,000 mAh is 1,500 mWh (the amps being replaced by watts once we factor in the voltage), which takes about 2,000 mWh to charge up, or just 2 Wh. The price of 1,000 Wh is about 14p, so each type has 0.028p added to it.

Rechargable batteries are very well suited for digital cameras (and other cameras) and for all other electrical devices. They’re less well suited (but still acceptable due to their phenomenally low price) in remote controls

NiMH Price per 1,000 mAh: 0.02801p
NiCd Price per 1,000 mAh: 0.02801p

In Closing

We can all do our bit to be greener. As seen above, for every £1 that you spend on a rechargeable battery, you’d need to spend £8.50 on alkalines for the same amount of power. You’d also generate the waste of 4 batteries for rechargables but over 20 for alkalines. Those numbers are even worse for zinc chlorides.

So not only do you cut down on highly toxic chemical waste, but you also save quite a fair amount of cash. Works for me.

It’s a Republican (conservatives) party thing. They have a mindset that “more spending is more better”. That’s the idea that as long as people are willing to spend money, that should provide the people with whatever they desire.

This requires credit. Nobody would be able to save up enough money to both live and buy a house or a car. So we have loans. A company trusts the customer to pay back the loan, making a tidy profit along the way. The customer borrows $20,000, he pays back $26,000 over five years or so, everyone is happy.

There were laws about that, preventing credit companies from loaning to bad people, people who had a poor credit rating. The conservatives, of the opinion that more spending is more better, repealed those laws. Initially it didn’t matter: Most money loaned is in the form of mortgages. As the housing market was booming, the bank could lend $100,000 to anyone, by the time the anyone defaulted, the house would be worth $120,000 or more. The bank could foreclose it and sell it at auction and get back their $100,000 and a bit of profit. With the laws out of the way, this is what the banks did: They gave mortgages to ANYONE.

Eventually the banks ran out of money to loan, so they made securities instead. But that’s another story. What happened was that the housing market reached critical mass and started to shrink a little. Values dropped a bit. Normally, no problem. With the loan laws out of the way, however, banks had hugely over-stretched. If they gave a mortgage worth $100,000 and only got $60,000 back at auction, they had lost $40,000. That was money they did not have, all their money was loaned out.

The government had to step in. That means using tax money to help the loan companies by way of low interest government loans. This would normally necessitate a rise in taxes for the government to pay for it. However, conservatives are deficit spenders. They cut taxes to give the people more money to spend, they don’t raise them. Their yearly government budget is always in the red, they always spend more than they recoup via taxation. This decreased confidence in the USD currency and caused that to tank on the global markets. This had a knock-on effect of driving up the (already rising) price of commodities, such as oil. This acted as a kind of tax, it raised the cost of living and reduced consumer spending. Consumers had to spend more on fuel rather than on consumer goods.

Conservatives create lots of entry level jobs, consumer spending means retail industries are prosperous, but it’s next to impossible for those people to get better jobs and better lives as there is no support from the government. Conservatives believe in buying a better life and if that means a better job, you have to buy that too (via education). If you can’t afford it, you’re screwed.

The liberals (US: Democrats) are largely the opposite. They have higher taxes and more government programs to help people move up in life, but this has the problem of leaving people less money to spend themselves, so companies end up in trouble because people don’t buy their stuff. The liberals give all kinds of cool protection laws (like the loan laws which the conservatives repealed to cause the current crisis) but at the same time this means that companies can’t exploit people as much as they can under conservatives, so they make less profit. conservatives do a “boom and bust” economy where the booms hopefully pay us over the busts, liberals do a low-growth, but more stable economy. It’s important not to spend too much time in either form of government, but to switch between them.

The “credit crunch” has been because banks have ran out of money, they loaned it all, then started losing it. This means they don’t want to loan anymore, not even to each other. That’s a sort of “divide by zero” for conservatives; It shouldn’t happen. It can’t happen. But it did.

Taking the mindset of what’s good for business is good for everyone is good in small, punctuated doses, but no good at all in the long term. The rank and file lower classes who pay for it all eventually become unable to because they’re being exploited too much. The money goes extinct and the exploiters go with them.

It’s like overfishing, the fishermen get better and better until they fish too much and the population of fish crashes. The fishermen then go bust. To a conservative, it’s best to fish now and fish as many as quickly as possible. A bust will happen, yes, but the prosperity before the bust should offset the bust’s impact. To a liberal, it’s best to manage fishing carefully to maintain a good catch but without causing a population crash in the fish. Prosperity won’t be as high, but there’ll be no busts.

There, then, is the crisis. Too much time with conservatives in charge (the Republicans) has resulted in “overfishing” of the financial markets, meaning the money ran out and the markets collapsed.

“The prime minister says the economic situation isn’t as bad people think and that Britain is well placed to weather the economic storm, but the Chancellor says we are at a 60-year low.” – George Osborne, Shadow Chancellor.

That’s all you should need to hear about the Conservative Party’s sleight of hand. So the Chancellor says we’re at a 60 year low (in some unstated economic measure – may well be the sales of playing cards for all we know). Does this mean that the economic situation is worse than people think? Does it mean we’re not well placed to weather it? No, it doesn’t.

When the Tories are this openly desperate to try to deflect scrutiny away from themselves, you have to wonder why. It was Descartes who said that a compelling pars destruens must be followed by an equally compelling pars construens, that is a argument against must be followed by an argument for something better. The Tories are full of the destruens but have precious little construens. They have lots of attack against the Government, but nothing of substance to add themselves. Are they willingly trying to make themselves unelectable?

What kind of an idiot votes for someone who so openly engages in deception and trickery? They clearly have no idea about the economic problems the world is undergoing so they try to distract us from the problem. Solutions, Tories. We want solutions, not whining.