Ecolight

The hard facts about batteries

2009-06-16T10:54:00.000-07:00

I was doing some research yesterday and found these figures: Americans use about 3 billion batteries a year; each person discards about 10 batteries per year. On this website http://www.ehso.com/ehshome/batteries.php This site is by Environment, Health and Safety Online and as far as I can tell it is a non-biased government site. I found the following here:

Batteries contain heavy metals such as mercury, lead, cadmium, and nickel, which can contaminate the environment when batteries are improperly disposed of. When incinerated, certain metals might be released into the air or can concentrate in the ash produced by the combustion process.
Batteries may produce the following potential problems or hazards:
Pollute the lakes and streams as the metals vaporize into the air when burned.
Contribute to heavy metals that potentially may leach from solid waste landfills.
Expose the environment and water to lead and acid.
Contain strong corrosive acids.
May cause burns or danger to eyes and skin.
In landfills, heavy metals have the potential to leach slowly into soil, groundwater or surface water. Dry cell batteries contribute about 88 percent of the total mercury and 50 percent of the cadmium in the municipal solid waste stream. In the past, batteries accounted for nearly half of the mercury used in the United States and over half of the mercury and cadmium in the municipal solid waste stream. When burned, some heavy metals such as mercury may vaporize and escape into the air, and cadmium and lead may end up in the ash.
Controversy exists about reclaiming household batteries. Currently, most batteries collected through household battery collection programs are disposed of in hazardous waste landfills. Even stores and chains that have established take-back programs admit that it often ends up in the trash. There are no known recycling facilities in the U.S. that can practically and cost-effectively reclaim all types of household batteries, although facilities exist that reclaim some button batteries. Battery collection programs typically target button and nickel-cadmium batteries, but may collect all household batteries because of the consumers' difficulty in identifying battery types.
This may change now that California has mandated recycling for "dry cell" batteries.

This is my writing again: Many consumer products have rechargeable batteries built into them so that when they are thrown away the rechargeable battery is thrown away and ends up in a landfill. All the wind up flashlights and solar flashlights I've seen (with the exception of a few windup flashlights by Freeplay that use a steel spring to store energy rather than a rechargeable battery) have a rechargeable battery in them, and usually a very cheap one that won't last that long. Its sad to see these products advertised as green or never needing batteries when they are really no different than any other consumer product with batteries. We need more consumer products that are not toxic when disposed and we need to find better ways to store energy than chemical batteries - the supercapacitor is one answer and there are other options too that we need to continue developing.

Supercapacitors or Batteries?

2009-06-01T11:14:00.000-07:00

To make a case for supercapacitors rather than batteries for flashlights, 3 main things stand out. First supercaps have no toxic chemicals, second they can be recharged very quickly, and third they can be recharged virtually unlimited times and last for 20 - 30 years - maybe longer - they haven't been out long enough to know if they will last beyond 30 years. This means that the Ecolight may be one of the first truly lifetime flashlights, needing no replacements and representing a new class or generation of consumer products.

2009-05-15T21:56:00.000-07:00

This is the first post about the Ecolight. I started developing this flashlight about 9 years ago when I saw the components available that could make a flashlight that would never need batteries or a bulb; these components were supercapacitors and LEDs. My dad was an electrician and when I was a kid he told me how capacitors are often charged and discharged thousands of times and never wear out - so I remember asking him why we couldn't use capacitors instead of batteries for things like flashlights and radios - he said because the capacitor would need to be as big as a house to hold enough power. Then about 20 some years ago super capacitors were invented and have been getting better every year. The Ecolight uses 2 super capacitors that are each the size of a C-cell battery. Some of the great things about these capacitors are that they can be recharged very quickly (4-minutes for the Ecolight) and an almost indefinite amount of times because they hold power electro statically rather than chemically, and finally they are made of non-toxic components. I made about 8 to 10 prototypes along the way until the final Ecolight that I am selling today. Most of them have been taken apart so the parts could be used for future prototypes, but the very first one I built I still have and I still use it for camping as it is solar charged and still works well. I'll post a picture of it soon. My dad died about a little over a year ago and before the Ecolight came out, but I'm sure he's thinking about that conversation we had back in 1964 now that its finally out - so I owe a lot of gratitude to him for all the help he gave me in learning about electronics.