The Oakland Tribune - April 3, 2006
Douglas Fischer, staff writer
MORAGA — Myrto Petreas and two friends did not imagine success could be so bittersweet
when they started an ad hoc battery collection program in this quiet community in Contra Costa County.
Petreas, a research chemist; Marie Kahn, a retired high school English teacher; and fellow
resident Leslie Engler put buckets in stores throughout Moraga and offered to properly dispose of batteries.
On one hand, they collected 1,600 pounds of dead Duracells and expired EverReadies in seven
weeks. On the other, the women discovered they could not lift a five-gallon bucket full of batteries — it weighs 70 pounds.
And, to their great shock, they learned the state law classifying batteries as hazardous waste — and therefore making them off-limits from your household trash bin — also prohibits the transport of more than 125 pounds at one time without a permit.
And that could sound the death knell for their small program.
The only place they know in Contra Costa County that will take their batteries is a household
hazardous waste facility in Martinez, at least a half-hour’s drive away. Since they get regularly four buckets — 280 pounds — yet cannot carry more than 125 pounds at a time, they need to make multiple trips. Every week.
“I don’t know that we can continue, unless we get more volunteers,” Petreas said after lugging two full buckets into the back of her SUV. “As long as you have to go all the way to Martinez, it’s hard. I have to work, so I can only go on a Saturday. How many Saturdays do you have?”
And these disposal issues, say recyclers, residents, community collectors like Petreas and Kahn, are the crux of the problem with the new state law classifying several household items as hazardous waste.
The law went into effect Feb. 9 and makes it illegal to dispose of batteries, fluorescent bulbs, cell phones, computers and various electric gadgets in the waste bin.Instead they must go, like paints and TVs, to designated drop-off centers.
Those, however, are scattered far and wide in the East Bay: one in Contra Costa County, three in Alameda County. With enforcement non-existent, people take the easy route, either stockpiling the stuff at home or just chucking it away.
What’s needed, the program’s volunteers say, is for the municipalities and professional waste
haulers to get involved. Because without them, recycling efforts — even home-grown efforts like the Moraga battery program — will not work.
“If curbside recycling didn’t exist, all that glass would just go into the landfill,” said Jeff LaFrance, who teaches environmental economics and land use management at the University of California at Berkeley and has studied the economics of recycling. He also helps with the Moraga battery program.
“People will be environmentally responsible within limits — as long as it doesn’t inconvenience
their lives,” he added. “But if they have to drive to Martinez, they won’t. It’s just too inconvenient.”
In Hayward, Charles Landmesser sees this on a vastly larger scale. Manager of Pennsylvania-
based AERC Recycling Solutions’ Hayward facility, Landmesser has fielded more queries about
batteries, but has yet to see a big increase in volume going through his plant.
“Batteries are ending up in the garbage — right, left, center and upside down,” he said. “The
reality is it all comes down to cost: What are people willing to pay to have this material properly handled.”
AERC typically gets 40,000 to 50,000 pounds of batteries a month, mostly from big corporations like Sun Microsystems and Albertson’s that have in-house battery collection programs.
The batteries go to two steel mills that blend the batteries into their steel. Since different batteries have different chemical properties, and both companies need specific chemical mixes, every battery gets sorted by hand, Landmesser said.
“The carbon-zinc are probably the most tricky battery — it looks like a AA (so) the only way you can tell is by the weight.”
Worse, there’s little money in battery recycling. The two companies recycling batteries, for now, are on the East Coast, in Buffalo, N.Y., and Atlanta. “So we incur quite a shipping charge,” Landmesser noted.
And that’s just batteries. Last year, Californians consumed 60 million fluorescent light bulbs —
both the long tubes and the newer ones that replace traditional incandescent lights.
All contain mercury, a potent neurotoxin. Yet AERC only recycled 3 million nationwide. The
lighting industry a few years back spent $2 million with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to promote fluorescent bulb recycling.
The nationwide recycling rate barely burped, nudging from 22 percent to 24 percent. “That’s
pretty pathetic,” Landmesser said. The Moraga women, he added, are doing an “absolutely wonderful” job. “The frustration is,” he added, “that we haven’t sent any real, reliable system to doing it. If we just put some teeth into the law, got some inspectors out there, then you would see a result.”
Karen Smith is working on that. Executive Director of the Alameda County Waste Management Authority, she’s also in charge of the county’s household hazardous waste program.
This week she hopes to present suggestions to agency’s directors on how to best work with
community groups and increase recycling efforts, she said.
There’s also a measure before the Legislature to impose a 10-cent recycling fee on select
batteries sold in California — akin to the state bottle recycling fee. It faces an uncertain future, given the quick death last year of an effort forcing manufacturers that sell batteries to also collect spent ones.
Meanwhile in Moraga, Petreas, Kahn and Engler are staggering under the volume moving
through their white plastic buckets.
“The problem, really, is we use so many batteries. I don’t think we’re capturing a fraction of the batteries used in Moraga,” Petreas said. “We don’t want to drop the bucket, so to speak, but we can’t do it ourselves.”
Contact Douglas Fischer at dfischer@angnewspapers.com.
