>> Battery disposal
>> is a non-issue in the Prius. They get recycled.

> Hehe, sorry, but if you want to consider the actual impact 
> of a vehicle
> on our planet a recycled battery most definitely is worse 
> then no
> battery (recycling can take alot of energy). And lets not 
> forget the
> huge energy and resources needed to manufacture the 
> batteries to start
> with. Then the energy and resources to build the electric 
> motors,
> relevant hardware to connect it to the rest of the car, 
> and the
> electronics.

Arguably the cost of a recycled battery is a charge on the 
use that the material is put to, not on the use that it WAS 
put to previously. ie you assume that the disposed of item 
has whatever value is placed on it when it enters the 
recycling scheme - positive if the recycler pays you, 
negative if they charge you and zero if they take it for 
free. Then the recycling operation calculates its own costs. 
As most originally high cost items, including batteries, 
will actually be paid for by a commercial recycler, and that 
would certainly include large batteries, then it seems 
reasonable to assume a zero value or greater for such items. 
And ecological and other costs are then borne by the 
recycler who presumably finds it cheaper to source their 
lead or cadmium or whatever from a pile of someone else's 
junk than from a mine. So, arguably, and it is arguable, a 
recycled battery is BETTER than no battery if the recycler 
will pay you for it, as it represents a lower cost resource 
than digging the material out of a hillside and processing 
it.

I'm aware of the potential deficiencies in such an argument 
but it seems an accurate enough one to take at a simplistic 
level;.

A major problem with "market forces" arguments, which this 
is one of, is that "the market" aka the invisible hand is a 
thief or a naive taker (depending on one's altruistic 
attitude). ie "the market" will acquire resource at the cost 
that it can, not at the cost that it "should" if all factors 
were considered "properly". "Should" has no meaning to 'the 
hand' - it deals only with "can". Friends of the hand deride 
'should' as attempts at nannying and at corruption of true 
economic drive, and this may often enough be true, but 
"should" also arises from the use of intelligent vision to 
identify local and distant peaks in the cost benefit 
continuum. The hand is a dumb brute that can only crawl the 
local gradient in the same way that natural selection does, 
and may find itself stalled on a local peak without 
"realising" (as it has no brain" that true optimum, even by 
its own blind rules, lies somewhere else if only something 
were able to move it there. The 'valley" which the hand is 
unable to crawl down into and cross to reach the higher 
pastures elsewhere may be (and arguably usually is) caused 
by it misvaluing resources that it has questionable rights 
to.

This assessment is not an attempt to inject social 
perspective per se but rather an attempt to understand 
reality. If eg an action impacts air quality or the disposal 
of 'divalent chromium, or lowers water table below the level 
where permanent pollution of an island's water lens will 
result (as per the misattributed example in "An inconvenient 
truth"), or ...  and forces controlling "the market" have 
not caught up with such issues, or do not detect the impact, 
or the impact is not appreciated, then air or water or life 
quality may be degraded until such issues are addressed. In 
due course you end up with China or industrial Russia or, I 
imagine, Pittsburgh, and people may then start to act. But 
the true past costs are then being paid for by unrelated 
future actions.

China is a good example, as I have just recently seen. What 
was for certain a once beautiful landscape is broken and 
battered beyond belief where-ever I looked. Throughout a 500 
km train ride, and at every other point where I was able to 
observe, visual evidence that the environment had been 
horribly abused abounded. If they ever decide to "fix" this 
the costs of the past will be visited on the products of the 
future.

I didn't notice any identifiable Prius batteries lying 
around.



            Russell 

-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist