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reclaiming lead from car and motorcycle batteries

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From 'Encyclopedia of Electrochemical Power Sources':
"Lead–acid batteries contain metallic lead, lead dioxide, lead sulfate and sulfuric acid. The negative electrodes are made of metallic lead containing also minor fractions of e.g., calcium, tin, antimony. The positive electrodes are made of lead oxides in various compositions."
 
You can get all the lead you need by going to your local police range and ask to dig up bullets out of the dirt birms and melt it down outside with a butane burner , or go to a indoor shooting range and ask for it ! You can also, still go to places that fix flats and mount tires and ask to buy there old wheel weights ! Some still have the lead ones !
 
I stay away. Far away from battery lead. There are so many other compounds in them than lead.
Plumbers lead, if you can find it.
But I use now Rotometals.
They sell pure lead. That is what you need for muzzleloaders.
I cast far more hardball type than for muzzleloader.
Rotometals has fast service and flat rate shipping. I have my order in three days.
You can buy whatever amount you want. Have some friends go in and buy a pallet full if you wish.
Check them out. To me, it is worth it to get first quality lead for casting.
 
Spillikins said:
I heard once that there was a way of extracting lead from sea water. Might be worth a try. Does anyone have any details?
Click to expand...

Read here - let us know how you get on, eh? Oh, BTW, you'll need to have a set-up like the Bonneville Dam in your back yard, too.

“It’s notoriously difficult to remove toxic heavy metal that’s persistent and present in a lot of different water sources,” Alkhadra says. “Obviously there are competing methods today that do this function, so it’s a matter of which method can do it at lower cost and more reliably.”

The biggest challenge in trying to remove lead is that it is generally present in such tiny concentrations, vastly exceeded by other elements or compounds. For example, sodium is typically present in drinking water at a concentration of tens of parts per million, whereas lead can be highly toxic at just a few parts per billion. Most existing processes, such as reverse osmosis or distillation, remove everything at once, Alkhadra explains. This not only takes much more energy than would be needed for a selective removal, but it’s counterproductive since small amounts of elements such as sodium and magnesium are actually essential for healthy drinking water.

The new approach is to use a process called shock electrodialysis, in which an electric field is used to produce a shockwave inside a pipe carrying the contaminated water. The shockwave separates the liquid into two streams, selectively pulling certain electrically charged atoms, or ions, toward one side of the flow by tuning the properties of the shockwave to match the target ions, while leaving a stream of relatively pure water on the other side. The stream containing the concentrated lead ions can then be easily separated out using a mechanical barrier in the pipe.

In principle, “this makes the process much cheaper,” Bazant says, “because the electrical energy that you’re putting in to do the separation is really going after the high-value target, which is the lead. You’re not wasting a lot of energy removing the sodium.” Because the lead is present at such low concentration, “there’s not a lot of current involved in removing those ions, so this can be a very cost-effective way.”

The process still has its limitations, as it has only been demonstrated at small laboratory scale and at quite slow flow rates. Scaling up the process to make it practical for in-home use will require further research, and larger-scale industrial uses will take even longer. But it could be practical within a few years for some home-based systems, Bazant says.

For example, a home whose water supply is heavily contaminated with lead might have a system in the cellar that slowly processes a stream of water, filling a tank with lead-free water to be used for drinking and cooking, while leaving most of the water untreated for uses like toilet flushing or watering the lawn. Such uses might be appropriate as an interim measure for places like Flint, Michigan, where the water, mostly contaminated by the distribution pipes, will take many years to remediate through pipe replacements.

The process could also be adapted for some industrial uses such as cleaning water produced in mining or drilling operations, so that the treated water can be safely disposed of or reused. And in some cases, this could also provide a way of recovering metals that contaminate water but could actually be a valuable product if they were separated out; for example, some such minerals could be used to process semiconductors or pharmaceuticals or other high-tech products, the researchers say.

Direct comparisons of the economics of such a system versus existing methods is difficult, Bazant says, because in filtration systems, for example, the costs are mainly for replacing the filter materials, which quickly clog up and become unusable, whereas in this system the costs are mostly for the ongoing energy input, which is very small. At this point, the shock electrodialysis system has been operated for several weeks, but it’s too soon to estimate the real-world longevity of such a system, he says.

Developing the process into a scalable commercial product will take some time, but “we have shown how this could be done, from a technical standpoint,” Bazant says. “The main issue would be on the economic side,” he adds. That includes figuring out the most appropriate applications and developing specific configurations that would meet those uses. “We do have a reasonable idea of how to scale this up. So it’s a question of having the resources,” which might be a role for a startup company rather than an academic research lab, he adds.

“I think this is an exciting result,” he says, “because it shows that we really can address this important application” of cleaning the lead from drinking water. For example, he says, there are places now that perform desalination of seawater using reverse osmosis, but they have to run this expensive process twice in a row, first to get the salt out, and then again to remove the low-level but highly toxic contaminants like lead. This new process might be used instead of the second round of reverse osmosis, at a far lower expenditure of energy.

The research received support from a MathWorks Engineering Fellowship and a fellowship awarded by MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab, funded by Xylem, Inc.
by MIT News
 
webb116054 said:
You can get all the lead you need by going to your local police range and ask to dig up bullets out of the dirt birms and melt it down outside with a butane burner , or go to a indoor shooting range and ask for it ! You can also, still go to places that fix flats and mount tires and ask to buy there old wheel weights ! Some still have the lead ones !
Click to expand...
Because then you would have the purest lead with no other metals added.
 
andy2175m4 said:
I got about 5 minie balls out of it,

not much, was a waste of time I guess

live and learn
Click to expand...
Well I have both a Harley battery and a car battery and was planning to do the same, now I'm not so sure that it's worth the time and trouble.
 
The last car battery I took to the metal recycler brought $15. Why would I want to go to all that work to salvage $2 worth of lead? Back in the early 70s I was shop foreman for a motorcycle dealer and was a blackpowder shooter. I stacked up 4 (if I remember) motorcycle batteries and burned them which took a few days. The amount of lead I salvaged was probably no more than the posts themselves. That convinced me that was a dead end.
 
Last edited:
I remember reading an article some years ago about the dangers of trying to get lead out of lead-acid batteries. Can't remember the toxicity problems with the internals, but the upshot was the only part sort of worth while are the battery posts. Hardly worth the effort of sawing them off the battery though - would make about 2 minie balls. :)
 
The Crisco Kid said:
That's pretty much where I am. The trouble is when we say "oh you can't do this or it will kill you" it just becomes another scare tactic unless we have the facts to back it up. Is it cadmium that gets released or something else? There's something in the batteries that are not healthy for sure.
Click to expand...
I thought it was hydrogen sulfide that was released but it still has to be removed and most people are not set up to do that.
 
I once applied for a job at a plant that recycled batteries. They would take old batteries apart and salvage all reclaimable material. The safety gear and procedures were extensive. Upon arriving at work, you had to change out of your street clothes and put on a HazMat suit. You had to wear eye and face protection as well as a respirator all of your working shift. Then, at the end of your shift you had to disrobe, turn in your safety equipment, shower and then get dressed. When I saw all of this, I was not interested in working in that environment. When I told them I was not interested in doing all of that they practically begged me to reconsider and please try the job. (They were having a very difficult time in getting and keeping employees.) I thanked them and once again politely declined. ----- My point being it was obviously a very hazardous job. Did you take any precautions before you took your battery apart?
 
In 1973 while stationed on Seguin Island light off the coast of Maine. I found some empty auto batteries that had lost the acid. I cast a bunch of balls from them.
Nit Wit
 

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