How does eneloop protect the environment?

Batteries are part of our modern life. Just imagine your household without batteries.

The amount of batteries sold in the European Union in 2005 was approximately 180.000 tons. In Germany for example more than 1.47 Billion batteries have been sold in 2007. More than 90 per cent of this amount came from disposable batteries; i.e. batteries which can only be used once and have to be disposed of after usage.

This alone represents a gigantic waste of resources if you consider that 26.000 tons of batteries plus packaging have been produced, transported and sold in Germany only for a single use. Also the unavoidable burden on the environment by the manufacturing process and by the transport should be considered. 

The governments of the EU member states have realized the potential threat for the environment by this huge amount of disposed batteries and have therefore requested the battery manufacturers to collect and recycle them. In several European countries collection and recycling systems have been setup, but In spite of all these efforts the amount of collected batteries is by far less than 50 percent in most countries. The reason for this is that the consumers have to be motivated to bring back the spent batteries to specific collection points and not dump them in the household garbage. The consequence of this still poor collection rate is that more than 90.000 tons of batteries end up in the household waste stream.  For example in 2007 in Germany 11.000 tons of disposable batteries have been collected compared to 26.000 tons sold.

Once the batteries have been collected they have to be sorted by chemistry in order to recycle them. The battery manufacturers together with the local collection systems have invested heavily in the latest technology to ensure a high degree of sorting accuracy. Only if the batteries are sorted correctly can they be recycled properly. Recycling of all kinds of batteries is technically possible today. Sorting and recycling rates of the collected batteries is increasing every year and does not represent a major problem any more. In Germany for example 92 per cent of the collected batteries in 2007 have been recycled and only 8 per cent had to be land filled.

SANYO has actively contributed to the constitutions of collection systems, and is continuously supporting improvements in collection, sorting and recycling of spent batteries. All batteries sold by SANYO are recyclable.