5.1. Collection of Spent Portable Rechargeable Batteries
Today, spent portable Ni-Cd batteries are mainly collected via four routes (Figure 23). The large majority comes through the sorting of batteries from general collection programs as those established in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria and other EU countries. Municipalities in Sweden and professionals organisations in Denmark are also contributing to their collection. Finally, in France a dedicated collection program for rechargeable batteries is in operation.
Sorting Ni-Cd batteries from collected streams is a critical operation for those composition where zinc batteries are dominating. Industrial sorting technologies are in operation in Europe (Euro Bat Tri - 2000 and Wiaux -2000) but not in all countries and not with the same efficiency. It is believed that a significant fraction of Ni-Cd batteries collected are still processed with zinc batteries and are not accounted separately.
In the future, the practise of separation of municipal waste before incineration will be more popular. Then, Ni-Cd batteries could be easily removed from municipal waste streams by using an electro-magnet overband in order to remove all Ni-Cd batteries together with other ferro-magnetic materials. This technology is currently used in the Netherlands (CollectNiCad 2001).
Sorting from General Collection
Collection by Professionals
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You can now recondition your old batteries at home and bring them back to 100 percent of their working condition. This guide will enable you to revive All NiCd batteries regardless of brand and battery volt. It will give you the required information on how to re-energize and revive your NiCd batteries through the RVD process, charging method and charging guidelines.