Recycled Batteries Turned Into Pigments

Jin

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Three Brazilian students have discovered a way to make pigmentation that can be used for coloring in ceramics, from batteries.

In today's community, we pretty much rely on batteries to keep our gadgets powered. When we throw them away, they either go to a landfill, where their toxic chemicals pollute the soil and water, or we recycle them, reusing their components. Here at AtBatt.com we offer a recycling service to help protect the environment, but these kids take it to another level with creativity.

Camila da Silva Bruzadelli, Alan Juliano de Andrade and Deborah Asbahr, of Limeira, Brazil are responsible for this. Having discovered a way to make good use of recycled batteries, they live in their state of Sao Paolo where 192 million batteries are used each year, with only a fraction of them being recycled. But what batteries they do receive, they disassemble into their constituent components, being cardboard, plastic, steel and graphite, each of which can be recycled using the existing infrastructure.

The zinc, manganese, and iron, can be combined with the electrolyte, which is treated with nitric acid, filtered, neutralized, and then heated at 1000C for 4 hours to obtain the various metallic oxides. These are then applied to ceramics, which are also baked and glazed. The oxides provide several colors; from a light rose to a dark brown. They plan on approaching the ceramics industry with this technology and hopefully end up reducing both the amount of artificial pigmentation created or mined from minerals, and the amount of batteries that do not make it to the recycling depots.

[EcoGeek]

Post a Comment

Name
E-mail (Your e-mail address will not be published)
1000 characters left

Blog Categories

Resources
News
Funnies
Exposed

Blog Archive

December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
October 2007
September 2007

SITE PROMOTIONS
Free Shipping
Earn Airline Miles
Weekend Special
Buy Today Save Extra 10%. Coupon Code: WQPK909

Call us toll-free at: 1-877-528-2288

About AtBatt.com

Customer Service

Shipping & Returns

Security & Privacy