It's a WRAP for battery recycling schemes

People around the country are being given the chance to participate in a range of battery recycling initiatives.

All the trials will be co-ordinated by the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP).

Currently kerbside collections involving around 350,000 households in a mixture of high-rise, urban and rural areas across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have been going on since March 2006.

This is ongoing, but further projects have earmarked for 2007 to include postal returns, community collection bins and shop take-back schemes.

The aim is to find the best ways to ensure that the UK meets the European Union Battery Directive that was agreed on 2 May 2006 and is expected to be transposed into UK law in 2008. It requires the collection of 25 per cent of all household batteries in the UK for recycling by 2012.

Spent batteries are a huge environmental hazard; most end up in people's dustbins and ultimately in landfill leaking hazardous heavy metals such mercury, lead and cadmium as the batteries degrade. This can cause soil and water pollution which damages the environment.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) says around 600 million batteries (22,000 tonnes) - the equivalent weight of 110 Jumbo Jets - are disposed of annually by UK consumers, and most are sent to landfill unnecessarily.

Because the UK is near the bottom of the EU battery recycling table, recycling just 0.5 per cent of portable batteries in 2002, the Government needs to establish collections schemes for the return of used portable batteries.

These are to be free of charge to the end user, so the current trials will examine the best and most efficient ways that this can be done.

The batteries are then sorted into batches based on the chemical content of the battery, then reprocessed to produce a number of different compounds that can be reused to produce new batteries, materials or products.

The UK schemes, which will collect all kinds of batteries except car and other industrial batteries, will vary greatly both in terms of the number and types of households and geographical areas covered.

The current kerbside scheme asks householders in the trial areas to put their batteries into either a sealable polythene bags or a small cardboard box. These are then put out with other recyclable waste to be picked up.