I arrived at work this morning to find my mouse out of action. It’s wireless, so doubtless far more wasteful than a cable-connected pointer, what with the need for the transmitting and receiving parts, and a whole second element plugged into the back of my Mac. Fortunately I don’t feel too guilty about that, as it was sent in for review and nobody asked for it back, so it’s not entirely my fault.
Some quick diagnosis quickly proved that the batteries were flat. Apart from this mouse, the only battery-powered possessions I own are my GPS receiver and the remote for my radio, so I rarely have cause to buy any. Now that I do, though, I started to wonder how green using this kind of mouse might actually be. In fact, how green are batteries in general?
They’re not.
Treehugger reported last week on a newly-published Australian study which revealed that 80% of the environmental cost of batteries – both disposable and rechargable – is incurred in the initial manufacturing process, transportation and shelf-stocking in a shop.
Clearly rechargables only inflict this environmental bruise once, and can then be recharged several hundred times for just the cost of the raw power you’re pumping in. Better still, if you buy NiMH cells, rather than NiCad, you eliminate cadmium from the production cycle altogether.
Cadmium is a particularly nasty chemical element, which if not properly looked after can cause almost as much damage to humans as it can to the environment. As Wikipedia explains:
[T]here have been notable instances of toxicity as the result of long-term exposure to cadmium in contaminated food and water. In the decades following World War II, Japanese mining operations contaminated the Jinzu River with cadmium and traces of other toxic metals. Consequently, cadmium accumulated in the rice crops growing along the riverbanks downstream of the mines. The local agricultural communities consuming the contaminated rice developed Itai-itai disease and renal abnormalities, including proteinuria and glucosuria. Cadmium and several cadmium-containing compounds are known carcinogens and can induce many types of cancer.
As more and more of the electronic gadgets we use in daily life – iPods, mobile phones and the like – ship with batteries that are designed to last the whole of their natural lives, this will become less of a problem, but rather than buying replacement batteries for this mouse I’ll be heading up into the loft tonight to dig out the battery charger that kept me in power throughout my teenage years, when I recycled my AAs for financial, rather than ecological reasons, and in the meantime plugging an old-fashioned cable-tied pointer pusher at work.
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