Depending on who you ask, batteries have been around for between 200 and 2,000 years. The accepted origin, in the former case, is 1800 and the mind of the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, who discovered that placing copper and zinc plates into saline made a current flow from one material to the other. It would take another hundred years for inventors, including Thomas Edison, to form the battery as we know it today.
Baghdad Batteries
The much older date for the creation of the battery can (probably) be attributed to wishful thinking. The Baghdad batteries, a set of artefacts discovered in 1936 in Iraq, seem to resemble a battery like Volta’s but an estimated age of two millennia means that they’re unlikely to have been used to store energy. An article from Panasonic insists that they’d be able to produce 1.5-2v, however.
A much more likely theory is that the ‘batteries’ were used in electroplating, despite the fact that this technology doesn’t seem to have existed at the time either. In any case, we can be assured that batteries have been around since at least the middle part of the Industrial Revolution and their use is only increasing as each year passes. There is one constant in this lifecycle, though – the disposable battery.
Disposable batteries are recommended for all kinds of purposes. It wouldn’t be unfair to say that one of the most common reasons for their purchase is for emergencies, whether that’s to power a torch in a blackout or to keep a radio running in the event of a natural disaster. As the idea of disaster prep continues to gain traction all over the world, advice regarding the type and quantity of batteries to keep around starts to proliferate, too.
The Rolling Stone website recommends that households have at least three stashes of batteries stored somewhere in the home, such as in a “bug-out” bag, in the car, and somewhere else that’s easy to access, like a kitchen drawer. A tech survival kit created by ExpressVPN adds to this by recommending that everybody keeps spares of AA, AAA, C, and D batteries to help with minor emergencies. Power banks and universal adaptors can also come in handy; in the case of an emergency, like a natural disaster, there’s indeed a point in keeping some mobile power sources.
A Health Hazard
Apart from this, AA batteries are predominantly used in cameras, torches, clocks, toys, and TV remotes. While this might seem like a bit of a last stand for disposable batteries, as lithium-ion takes over, all the evidence suggests that the market for this kind of power source will continue to grow. In fact, a press release on the Globe Newswire website indicated a compound annual growth rate of 5.20% between 2018 and 2023.
Unfortunately, batteries are problematic almost by definition. Yale School of the Environment claims that even one of the greenest things somebody can do with a battery – recycle it – can sometimes be a health hazard. Why? Lead-based car batteries are usually offloaded to less economically-developed countries to be dismantled, where they cause illness and death.
Mercifully, the humble disposable battery is generally non-toxic, containing elements like graphite, zinc, potassium, and manganese, all of which can be recycled. Still, when left to decay in landfill sites, they can leak metals into the surrounding soil. In the USA, around 180,000 batteries suffer this fate every year, making the efforts to recycle them seem a little pointless.
As a final point, batteries could be about to face a reckoning, as the world’s stocks of lithium dry up. Whether this means that disposable batteries will become increasingly common is up for debate.
