W.L. Rathje

By W.L. Rathje

Love canal. Few words are more synonymous with fear and loathing in modern America than this ironically named industrial hazardous waste dump that burst into the public's consciousness in the late 1970s. Today solid waste managers across the country are trying to expand this same awareness to include a menagerie of household hazardous waste (HHW), from used motor oil and unused nail polish remover to leftover paints and pesticides, that people unthinkingly carry out of their homes every refuse pickup day.

The most feared beast in the jungle of HHW is very likely the common household battery. The rate of household discard of dry-cell batteries has nearly doubled since 1975. In fact, America is abuzz with batteries. Batteries have increasingly become the power behind what most Americans view as basic necessities of living. AAAs in remote controls open garage doors and switch TV channels; AAs protect homes in smoke alarms and entertain in Walkmans and Game Boys; Cs power bike lights, small toys, and a variety of strange and wonderful novelties; Ds do the same in flashlights, bigger toys, and boom boxes as do 9-volts in radios and remote-control toys; and myriad miscellaneous batteries run everything from watches and cameras to laptop computers and our ever-present cell phones.

The batteries from any one household might seem innocent enough - one is tossed out about once every two weeks - but aggregated at the community level, household batteries are a menace. Tucson, AZ's 260,000 households added well more than 4 million dry-cell batteries to local landfills in 2000, and the number discarded each year is probably still growing.

Household batteries have become a primary focus of programs to collect HHW, which now exist in more than 3,000 communities nationwide. Every one of these programs has limited resources and must allocate what it has with great care. In making decisions about ways to educate the public to properly dispose of their hazardous wastes, information about the concentrations and frequencies of household dry-cell battery discards within target communities is extremely useful. The Garbage Project has such data, and my intent here is to share them with you.

Data for the analyses I will discuss were generated by collecting and sorting garbage pickups from nearly 4,000 households (actually, only 3,839, but who's counting!). Once aggregated at the census tract level by income, age, and ethnicity data, results were unexpected, interesting, and perhaps worthy of further consideration and follow-up studies.

Not surprisingly, results suggest that higher-income households tend to consume (and discard) more dry-cell batteries. Age composition of households also appears to play an important role in determining dry-cell consumption. Ethnicity is another important factor in dry-cell battery use and discard. Anglo, Hispanic, and African American households are represented in Garbage Project samples. Hispanic households consume the most batteries and African American households the fewest, with Anglo households' battery consumption placed in the middle between the two. Although the difference in battery discards between Anglo and Hispanic Americans disappears when household size is controlled, African American households still consume the fewest batteries, even on a per-capita basis - about one-half of the batteries that cycle through Anglo and Hispanic households on a per-capita basis.

Of the 3,839 household refuse pickups examined for HHW, 275 pickups (7.2%) contained 696 actual batteries. Battery data were compiled for analyses by battery type and by pickup (including "zero" pickups in which no batteries were found).

The socioeconomic characteristics of households from which garbage was collected were available only at the level of the census tract in which they were located. These battery data were sorted in three locales: Marin County, CA (the highest-income county in the US) - 1,022 garbage pickups from 12 census tracts; New Orleans Parish, LA - 1,109 garbage pickups from six census tracts; and Tucson, AZ - 1,708 garbage pickups from 13 census tracts.

Although higher-income households consume more dry-cell batteries as a whole than the other two income groups, the difference between middle- and lower-income groups is not substantial. A closer look at the discards of specific battery types suggests that only certain types of battery consumption are responsible for the difference between the upper-income and lower-income groups. The discard of AAAs and AAs among upper-income households is substantially higher than the other groups; in addition, "exotic" batteries, such as lithium, button, and 6-volt batteries, were observed almost exclusively in upper-income households' garbage.

On the other hand, Cs and Ds are fairly constant across income classes. The smaller dry-cell batteries (As and exotics) usually drive more expensive devices, such as certain cameras and portable cassette and CD players, whereas the larger varieties are used in more ordinary and less expensive equipment, such as flashlights and toys. Thus, this does not suggest that household income affects the ability to buy dry-cell batteries per se. Rather, it probably indicates that higher income allows household members to purchase more expensive battery-operated equipment and to use it more frequently.

Battery discards are also affected by the age of household members. As expected, neighborhoods with the youngest median-age households (in the 20s) - and youngest children, on average - discarded dry-cell batteries at a high level. Nevertheless, the greatest difference among age groups disappears on a per-capita basis. The per-capita discard rates of household residents in the 20s and 40s groups are almost identical, and that of the 30s group is only slightly lower. Therefore, contrary to the expectation that younger generations consume more batteries, older adults appear to consume almost as many batteries as the children and teenagers inhabiting younger median-age households.

One possible reason for this is that older adults use dry-cell batteries for different purposes than children, such as button batteries for hearing aids. The patterns of discard across battery types, however, are not very different between the 20s and 40s groups. But also, within the same income group, the younger the median age, the more battery discards per capita; and within the same age group, the higher the income, the more battery discards per capita, without exception. The effects of age and income cancel each other out and generate the apparent lack of difference in total battery discards among age groups. In other words, once the age factor is isolated, the rational expectation about the effects of age - that households with more school-age children will actually consume more batteries - holds true.

Anglo households in all three study communities have comparable battery discard patterns. OK, but there was one real surprise: Anglo and Hispanic households discarded more than twice the batteries per capita than African American households threw out. Income does not seem to produce this difference between Hispanic and African Americans. However, because the median age of all Hispanic sample tracts is in the 20s and that of the sample African American tracts is in the 30s and 40s, age may account for some of the difference in battery discards between Hispanic and African American households. Age does not explain, however, the lack of difference between Hispanic and Anglo Americans nor the difference between Anglo and African Americans.

Although there is certainly valuable information for marketing batteries in the Garbage Project's initial study of battery discards, the most powerful rationale for this analysis is to protect our environment from them. The initial observations by this study about patterns of the household discard of dry-cell batteries clearly provide some useful information to community HHW collection programs on the most efficient ways to educate the public in proper disposal methods. That's a good buzzzzzzz.

Archeologist W.L. Rathje is founder and director of the Garbage Project.

MSW - September/October 2003