Once in the ground, an old battery pollutes 16 square meters, leaking toxic components that make land infertile for the next 50 years.
In Ukraine, there are thousands of tons of used batteries accumulated over decades. In the best-case scenario they are stored in warehouses, but more often they end up in landfills or even in the Black Sea.
Ukraine imports all of its batteries – officially there come over 3,000 tons of batteries a year – and only less than 1% are recycled.
Meanwhile, the European Union recycles 45% of batteries after introducing legislation on waste management, including on recycling batteries. According to the law, producers finance recycling.
To fight the problem in Ukraine, three volunteers from Dnipro, a city of nearly 1 million people located 480 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, decided to create a project called Batteries, Get In! six years ago to collect and safely dispose of batteries.
Lyuba Kolosovska, the cofounder of the project, calls batteries the “most popular among hazardous waste” and believes that her initiative can unite Ukrainians to recycle them.
“Everybody uses batteries, and so people can be more attentive to them than to pesticides or radioactive waste, which are relatively far from their day-to-day life,” Kolosovska said.
The first spark
Kolosovska used to work as a business analyst, while the other two co-founders came from the information technology sector. The friends decided to start an eco-friendly initiative as a tribute to Volodymyr Goncharenko, an ecologist who was murdered after he discovered toxic waste in eastern Ukraine and publicly raised the issue of the condition of Ukraine’s drinking water.
“The murder of a person who was involved in such an investigation gave me understanding that such serious problems can’t be solved alone,” Kolosovska said.
The friends co-founded Batteries, Get In! in 2013, and it eventually took off: by the end of 2018, they had 1,500 collection points that amassed some 60 tons of batteries. The volunteers stored them in a warehouse in Dnipro.
“Suitable name, good design, user-friendly connection mechanics and people started to call us and open sites next to house entrances and in offices,” Kolosovska said.
But the level of bureaucracy in the country, the absence of any laws on recycling batteries and strong resistance from battery importing companies have made the path thorny for the environmental activists.
In addition, Ukraine’s only battery recycling plant, Argentum in Lviv, shut down in 2018, as it lacked the technology to dispose of batteries safely, according to Martha Pankevych, a lawyer at Environment People Law, a public interest environmental law firm.
The problems reflect the wider issue of how Ukraine conducts waste management, according to Anatolii Kutsevol, the director of the reform support team at the Ecology Ministry.
“Unfortunately, for the past 20 years, there have been only talks about how the utilization should be done – no real actions,” Kutsevol said.
In the fall of 2018, Batteries, Get In! made a difficult decision: the project quit its volunteer activities and switched to payed format of accepting batteries This was the only way to keep up the project, because the EU recycling plants ask for money to recycle batteries.
Their goal was to begin transferring the collected batteries to EU plants, either to the one in Germany or in Romania.
“When we just started to collect used batteries, I didn’t know that you must pay for their disposal,” Kolosovska said.
On average, the plant in the EU charges 400 euros per ton of batteries, but the final cost usually doubles or even triples because of the cost of transportation and documents needed for their operations.
To achieve the goal, Batteries, Get In! launched a service called Korobochki (Boxes in Ukrainian), where the company or even a person can buy a container for $200, where 10 kilograms of used batteries can be collected and recycled at a plant in the EU.
Bitter reality
Having seen the recycling sector from the inside, Kolosovska claims that there are people who make money illegally in the business.
“Recycling sector is insane mafia,” she said. For example, there are shady waste collection companies across Ukraine that ask to pay 36 cents to dispose of one kilogram of used batteries, some $360 per ton. But as they get the money, they mix the batteries with other waste and send them to a landfill, where they pay only $3 per ton.
Alexander Vozny, founder and owner of the Kyiv-based Waste Management Center, a smaller company that also collects recyclable waste, agrees with Kolosovska.
“The market in Ukraine is largely grey. We know what to do with electronic devices and how to get valuable components from them, but the situation with batteries is different,” Vozny said.
A janitor sweeps the street in Kyiv near a hazardous waste tank, from which used bulbs and batteries fall out on Nov. 14, 2019. (Pavlo Padufalov) (Pavlo Podufalov)
Because of this uncertainty, Vozny’s company had never accepted batteries to recycle. It started to do it actively only in the last year, after demand from the company’s clients.
“Today we store more than one ton of batteries in special containers,” Vozny said. “Collecting batteries and their storage are already important to prevent them from ending up in landfills so that the toxic components won’t get into the ground.”
Corporate success
Currently, 72 companies cooperate with Batteries, Get In!, including Adidas, Deloitte, Asus, Work.ua and ProCreditBank and tech companies such as Lohica, MacPaw.
“This is one of the easiest ways a company or a person can have a more healthy and ecological way of life,” said Oleksandra Cherniavska, curator of green projects at MacPaw. “But I don’t even know who’d do it, apart from Batteries, Get In!”
MacPaw bought two boxes for a school in Kyiv Oblast, one box for the Faculty of Informatics at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute and one for a student space called Belka.
Batteries, Get In! has already collected 1.5 tons in 2019, and it expects the number to grow rapidly in December as their boxes will be installed in Epicenter and New Line, two leading Ukrainian building materials retailers.
Epicenter has even forbidden to retail batteries if their producers don’t finance the utilization of them. The prices, however, won’t go up, as it comes from producer profits.
The first truck with 20 tons of batteries, the smallest volume possible for recycling, will head to a plant in Romania around January 2020 – though that accounts for less than 1% of the import volume of batteries this year. Kolosovska hopes to increase to 1.5% next year.
For Kolosovska, it’s exhausting. She has to get permissions to transport the batteries, which so far has taken 70 days. When she gets it, the Romanian side will have to agree as well. In the EU, the same process takes three weeks in total.
Kolosovska plans to recycle the other 60 tons stored in Dnipro at an EU plant as well, but first she will have to raise 24,000 euros as at the time the batteries were collected for free.
Positive Steps
Two draft laws on waste management and batteries recycling were filed to Ukraine’s parliament in October 2019 that aim to introduce more responsibility on battery producers.
According to the bills, importers and producers must create a non-governmental organization that sets the price for battery recycling.
Kutsevol calls it “a European approach.”
“This is the only mechanism that allows the market to solve the problem independently,” he said, adding that the consumers won’t feel the change, as it only adds from 0.5% to 1% to retail costs.
Discussions on building battery recycling plants were held as well, but it was decided that for now it is best to continue taking batteries to the EU. A European plant recycles 750-15,000 tons annually while Ukraine can hardly collect 20 tons for recycling.
However, despite the fact that Kolosovska sees more political will in the new government to solve waste issues in Ukraine, she still sees huge fights around the new law.
“There are many lobby groups. It’s still hard to predict when the law will be adopted since too many interested players are involved,” she said. “It’s a war for money.”
But even if the law were passed now, it will take a year to come into effect. Introducing norms for recycling batteries will take three more years.
However, Kolosovska is sure that some companies still won’t follow the law and will try to cheat with help from corrupt officials or shady waste management companies, making it harder to get closer to EU levels of battery recycling.
“It took the EU 17 years to reach this level,” Kolosovska said. “So it can’t be done (immediately) by the wave of a magic wand.”
