Life-cycle Management And Resourcing For Dry Battery

With worldwide resource consumption rising to an unreasonably high level and solid wastes drastically increasing, there arises the need to change the material use and resource consumption pattern that barely leaves any room for recycling. In order to solve this problem and meet the demand of battery waste management in Zhejiang Province, China, LCA, a significant tool to analyze and assess the process of material use, was chose as a effective method to analyze the mercury-free alkali-manganese dry battery system and to assess their potential environmental effects as well as resource consumption in its entire life cycle and at each life stage. Also, by means of LCA of the dry battery system, the dissertation attempts to explore various methods including recycling for disposing and treating spent batteries and their corresponding advantages and disadvantages. The main findings are:(1) With acidification posing as the dominant form of environmental impacts which accounts for 59%, environmental impacts of dry batteries within its life cycle are mainly regional. And pollution of acidification, together with that of smoke and solid waste takes up 95% of environmental pollution by estimation; most environmental impacts linked to the entire life cycle of dry batteries stem largely from the processing of raw material production, which is over 60%; while the production of batteries only accounts for a rather small portion less than 15% in environmental impacts as a whole. Further study demonstrates that impacts from raw material production are incurred by discharge of SO₂ in the course of primitive raw material processing. Therefore, in order to reduce the quantity of "Three Wastes"(gas waste, liquid waste, solid waste) incurred in the life cycle of dry batteries and to ease their overall burden on the environmental system, priority should be placed over cutting down on disposal of wastes in the process of primitive raw material production. To testify that assumption, two abridged models for dry batteries system are formulated, one used to assess various types of impacts and to identify the primary ones in its life cycle in general, the other used to identify those life stages that give rise to the greatest environment burdens. If refined, the model may help identify responsibilities of those administrative departments concerned and provide theoretical and methodological support for systemizing management of spent batteries on the part of society which is aimed to collect spent batteries and recycle them and for implementation and improvement of present environmental policies.(2) Basic formula was established for comparing and assessing environmental impacts of dry batteries in the entire life cycle and at each life stage respectively. It is found that recycling has greater advantage over land-filling if conditions permit; moreover, recycling dry batteries can reduce ultimate disposal of solid waste, though more energy will be consumed in the process itself and more pollutants will be produced,, What is more, by replacing some primitive raw material with recycled material, there will be a considerable drop in raw material manufacturing, waste discharging and corresponding energy consumption. As a result, the overall burden is reduced brought on by dry batteries during its life cycle on resource and the entire environmental system.(3) Environmental advantages and disadvantages of various types of methods are compared and evaluated for treating and disposing of dry batteries in terms of their cost-effectiveness. This is realized by calculating fluctuation of energy consumption and life-cycle environmental impacts stemming from coal consumption increases in the course of dry batteries treatment and disposal. Both cost-effectiveness are examined, that is, cost-effectiveness of resource consumption and cost-effectiveness of environmental...