Written on October 20, 2008 – 5:08 am | by Maria Mihale |

My recently purchased Olympus digital camera is an alkaline batteries eater, there’s no doubt about it, as the device can be revived with four AA batteries. Imagine I’m very enthusiastic about taking pictures therefore I threw away dozens of these power sources. I know, it this new green era we live in, it’s almost the same as chopping down like five old-growth oak trees or something, but throwing them away was handier, if I may say so. It was so damn easy.

But if you get to think about it for a couple of minutes, you’d realize that there isn’t much to do with those dead batteries. Yes, they are really bad for the environment if we don’t dispose of them properly. The right thing to do is to send them to special recycling centers, but this would mean too much of a trouble, right? Because we’re all too indolent to just have a couple of minutes to properly recycle alkaline batteries. So hundreds of tons end up in landfills where their toxic innards seep into the earth.



But you know what? Those batteries you’re throwing away may not have enough energy left to power your gadgetry, but it does have enough juice to light up a low-energy LED. This is the idea South Korean designer Sung Woo Park and Sunshee Kim based their conceptual Energy Seed on. This is a stylish street lamp powered entirely by discarded batteries. The whole point is to encourage people to throw their batteries away into the Energy Seed. There’s a slot for nearly every size battery. They are then stacked upon each other and the combined power works together to power a street lamp.

Americans, for example, purchase nearly 3 billion dry-cell batteries every year to power their gadgets, many of them being tossed after a single use. And this is bad, don’t you think? Nevertheless, Park thinks this is only a temporary solution, saying: “Of course once the bins are full, we’re left with the same original problem. Somebody has to collect all those spent batteries and recycle them”.



Energy Seed is a cool idea, undoubtedly, but it’s not terribly practical. Hopefully, this isn’t sustainable either, because with a little bit of luck, we won’t have alkaline much longer. Still, until that moment, Energy Seed is a way for us to recycle alkaline batteries, or at least makes us conscious about the consequences involved.

Seriously now, this idea makes a lot of sense, don’t you think? Let’s just hope that Energy Seed will overstep the bounds imposed by its conceptual character. Someday.

(Source YankoDesign.com)