A lithium battery pretending to not be a battery?

[bombastinator]

So I ran across this video of a disposable that has a “capacitor” instead of a battery and thus in theory doesn’t have the disposal problems of lithium batteries… except it apparently does. The reason people worry about lithium containing devices such as batteries is lithium burns energetically on contact with air and produces a lot of gas which can cause an explosion. Anything with a significant amount of lithium in it is potentially an antipersonel mine (yes, this includes your wireless earbuds) The time to explosion is of unknown duration. It’s usually quite long. A hundred years or more, but not always, and landfills don’t go away so they all will eventually go boom if not properly recycled. Normal capacitors are generally metal plates or carbon so they don’t have this problem and are regulated differently. This “capacitor” though doesn’t. It’s more or less a battery that is merely masquerading as a cpacitor to avoid regulation. Strikes me as potentially hellishly dangerous. If not to the user then someone else later after it becomes garbage. They won’t all do it of course. As a lithium battery is discharged it becomes lithium carbonate, which isn’t explosive. The thing is though that lithium batteries STOP DISHARGING before they are completely empty, so an old and degrading lithium battery will still have some metallic lithium in it. It really perplexes me why one might do that. Lithium is expensive but alkali is cheap. The company could have simply put in an alkaline battery and there would be no problem.

 

[smacuser]

I'm looking for adjustable mAh.

 

[bombastinator]

Adjustable battery capacity?! I don’t think it works that way. I’ve seen higher draw ability in lower mAH batteries but they’ve always been different batteries. I’m guessing this is sarcasm. If what I am thinking is incorrect how is it incorrect? Perhaps I just didn’t follow he train far enough. Thinking about it more, I added to the post. I still think landfills and sewers (because some idiot or clumsy person is going to flush one, accidentally or on purpose) a hundred years from now will potentially have to be treated the same as minefields.

 

[bombastinator]

All one has to do with lithium batteries is take them to a recycler. Batteries plus take them, also any fire department. I’m a bit astounded that any company that sells things with lithium batteries isn’t required to also take them in my state but there may be others where they are. Lithium and lithium carbonate are valuable, so it sort of surprises me that it’s not done everywhere. Once a battery gets into the recycling stream it’s fine. It just has to get there.

 

[englishmick]

All one has to do with lithium batteries is take them to a recycler. Batteries plus take them, also any fire department. I’m a bit astounded that any company that sells things with lithium batteries isn’t required to also take them in my state but there may be others where they are. Lithium and lithium carbonate are valuable, so it sort of surprises me that it’s not done everywhere. Once a battery gets into the recycling stream it’s fine. It just has to get there.

Few years ago I googled lithium battery recycling. Forget the details but what I saw was that the process is very complicated and expensive. Physically dismantling them to extract the good stuff was difficult. Another method was to melt them in a furnace then extract the useful elements, that extraction was difficult and also produced toxic gasses that were hard to deal with. I imagine it's even harder with something like a disposable vape where the battery is encased in assorted plastic and metal parts.

That was a while ago, maybe they have better methods now.

 

[englishmick]

I searched and found a post I made in Apr 2019 about this.

I looked it up and found this. Article was a year old.

A Look At The Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling Industry And Companies | Seeking Alpha

The history of Li-ion battery recycling
Less than 5% of spent lithium-ion batteries are recycled today. The reason for why it has not been widely practiced in the past is mostly due to poor economics. The following quote from a 2011 article helps explain why:

Recycling lithium-ion batteries is an incredibly complex and expensive undertaking that includes:

• Collection and reception of batteries;
• Burning of flammable electrolytes;
• Neutralization of hazardous internal chemistry;
• Smelting of metallic components;
• Refining & purification of recovered high value metals; and
• Disposal of non-recoverable waste metals like lithium and aluminum.

The process is economic when a ton of batteries contains up to 600 pounds of recoverable cobalt that’s worth $40 a pound. The instant you take the cobalt out of the equation, the process becomes hopelessly uneconomic.

Source

Battery University quotes:

The reason Li-ion battery recycling has previously been uneconomic is the complexity and low yield of recycling. The retrieved raw material barely pays for labor, which includes collection, transport, sorting into batteries chemistries, shredding, separation of metallic and non-metallic materials, neutralizing hazardous substances, smelting, and purification of the recovered metals. It is often cheaper to mine raw material than to retrieve it from recycling. Lithium from recycled batteries is commonly used for non-battery applications, such as lubricating greases that are found in WD-40 and other products, rather than batteries.