Have you ever thought of making a battery salad? Take a few batteries, trim them … No, of course you did not. It’s absurd. They are not edible. They are even dangerous. If you see a child battling a battery, you jump as stung to blow it out of his hand. And yet, there is the risk of getting to “eat” the toxic substances from a battery without knowing it. How does that happen? Simple – when you throw the spent battery into the garbage.

When you throw the garbage, you have a feeling of satisfaction, right? Okay, I got it out of the house, I got rid of the mess, it’s clean. Wrong. The “house” of each of us stretches far behind the door or after the gate. The air, the water, the food we eat comes “after the gate”, from the environment that we believe will have an infinite capacity to eliminate our waste. It so does not.

The battery that is dumped does not disappear like magic. It reaches a landfill where the nickel, mercury, lead and other toxic substances it contains emanate in the air and enter the soil. Because everything is circular in nature, the waste that is not recycled will find the way back to us those who believe that we got rid of it the moment we took it out of the house.

But it is not the only wrong idea about recycling waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). We publish, in Ziare.com, only a few of the most common misconceptions, from the experience of volunteers of the national environmental education program Recycling Patrol:

It can be done without me, it’s not my job

It’s too complicated to collect WEEE properly

It is better to keep the device and reuse it for other purposes

A piece of e-waste discarded does not matter

It’s okay to give the e-waste to whom pays better for it

You know them. You heard them. Read the whole article and find out the clearest arguments with which we can dismantle these prejudices.