The Big Battery Hunt for World Environment Day by School Council 2022

The School Council talked to the school about their work to care for our environment by setting up a used battery collection today.  This is what they said:

As you may know, it was World Environment Day on the 5th June and, to help improve our world, we want to collect and recycle as many used batteries as possible! Many of you have brought in batteries already and we are so excited to say that so far we have collected over 500 hundred batteries already! 

Did you know that each year in the UK we throw away around 600 million batteries?

Laid end-to-end these batteries would reach from the UK to Australia and back again. That is a lot of batteries!

Why is recycling batteries so important?

Batteries can be found in every room in the house. They are used in electrical and electronic items, for example: toys, remote controls, mobile phones, alarm clocks and even doorbells. In fact, every person in Britain uses about 10 batteries a year!

Thousands of tonnes of CO2 emissions could be avoided if the UK meets its recycling targets. In the UK, around 40,000 tonnes of portable batteries were sold in 2020, with only around 18,000 tonnes being recycled.

Most batteries are put into rubbish bins and then taken to landfill sites. There are different types of batteries which can contain dangerous chemicals including: lead, cadmium, zinc, lithium and even mercury.

When batteries begin to rot away in landfill sites these chemicals may leak into the ground, which can cause soil and water pollution. When chemicals contaminate soil and water animals, humans and the environment can be harmed.

Recycling is a great way to help protect the environment. Each battery placed in a recycling bin will be taken apart and the materials will be used to make something new.

So how can we help? When you go home, speak to your adults and hunt for any batteries that need recycling. Bring them into school and give them to your class teacher. Each year group will have a box and we want to see if you can fill the boxes! Then your teacher will give Miss Bowyer the boxes and we’ll count all of the batteries. If we’re ambitious, we could collect over one thousand batteries! We’ll then take them to a recycle point.