Battery recycling off to flying start at K mart - automobile batteries

Discount Store News, August 20, 1990

Battery Recycling Off to Flying Start at K mart

TROY, Mich. -- K mart has paid $2 apiece for 100,000 junk lead-acid batteries during the first month of its auto battery recycling promotion.

An estimated 40 million junk batteries are sitting around U.S. garages and basements, often because customers don't know what to do with them. Most discounters lack a chainwide policy about accepting junk batteries and often tell purchasers of new batteries either to take their junkers to service stations or toss them out in the garbage.

K mart, Fred Meyer and Rose's Stores are notable exceptions, encouraging their customers to exchange junk batteries by charging a core deposit of $5 ($3 at Rose's) until they do.

K mart advertises that it is willing to pay $2 apiece for all 40 million, or $80 million. Realistically, K mart expects to buy one million junk batteries in the first year.

Exide, its vendor, is paying K mart $2.50 each for the salvaged batteries, so the environmental program probably is a break-even proposition, after deducting administrative costs. Exide picks up the batteries from K mart stores during the normal course of servicing the account.

Along with environmental concerns, a world shortage of lead, prompting a swift run-up in lead prices, helped spur Exide and K mart to launch their campaign to "get the lead" out of old batteries.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin and New York have joined 20 other states in passing mandatory battery recycling laws and barring junk batteries, with their poisonous lead content, from landfills. Effective Jan. 1, retailers in those states will have to start accepting junk batteries from customers.

In Wisconsin, retailers will be allowed to charge customers $3 to take an old battery off the hands of those who don't purchase a new battery. In addition, they may charge purchasers of new batteries a $5 core deposit, refundable upon return of a junker.

In New York, retailers must charge a $5 core deposit and accept two batteries a month from customers, at no cost, even if they don't buy new ones.

At all of its 2,324 stores, K mart charges battery purchasers a $5 core deposit, refundable upon the return of a junk battery. Such core deposits encourage recycling rates of about 80 percent, compared with rates as low as 1 percent at retailers that decline to charge deposits.

K mart's junk battery purchase program applies only to those who don't buy new batteries.