The new year has brought with it a bevy of new laws and regulations when it comes to recycling and waste management. One of the industries that will be forced to make change will be the battery industry which was recently made responsible for the collection and recycling of batteries. The law aimed to take the responsibility for battery recycling away from people and putting it on the shoulders of the businesses that produce the batteries, largely because the previous system wasn’t working as less than three percent of batteries in the UK are recycled. The new plan should raise the recycling rates for batteries in the UK but the problem now is where they are going to be processed.
The manufacturers of batteries are now required to offer customers free recycling and those who sell industrial and automotive batteries to large businesses will also be responsible for collecting them. This should help battery recycling but according to Defra this will open up the problem of exactly where these batteries will be processed. The UK hopes to raise its battery recycling rate to ten percent over the next year but Defra claims that they lack the facilities to process this large amount of batteries, which means much of the waste will have to be shipped overseas for recycling. Even though battery recycling saves a lot of carbon emissions, sending it overseas will offset some of those cuts.
Defra claims that the primary reason that these facilities do not exist is because they were never needed before as the UK only recycled around one thousand tonnes of batteries per year.
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