I have a friend who enjoys the singular and bizarre hobby of collecting used wheel weights. Walking anywhere with him means he’s spending most of the time looking in gutters, stooping down, and uttering “Oh! This is a good one!” while you sit there contemplating his impending lunacy. During his searches, he also comes across an inordinate number of used, often smushed, batteries. He finds them in the gutter.
A few pertinent details: Some are old enough that the entire casing has stripped off, others new enough that they seem to have been discarded in the last few days. They are largely double As. We live in San Francisco and the phenomenon is real here. I’m unsure about other cities though and would be curious about other, dense, pedestrian-friendly burgs like New York or Chicago.
But why, why, why are there batteries everywhere? We’ve done a good amount of hypothesizing about this and haven’t reached anything satisfactory. We’ve guessed that they were discards from Walkmen but I haven’t seen anyone using a walkman around here in years. Perhaps from some device the Meter Maids use? Or is it just that they’re heavy enough that Street Cleaning mobiles don’t pick them up, so some have been there for decades?
There are enough batteries that it can’t be something random. Is there something I’m missing? Is this like the old shoe we so often see off the side of the highway? Can the Dope bring me closure? The exciting answers, after this post.
I would posit the construction has a lot to do with their persistence. Being small and round, it’s easy roll into nooks and crannies - being dense they’re less likely to be collected by leaf blowers, street sweepers, and whatever other cleaning methods generally used to clear detritus from the roads. Plastic shrink wrapping makes them relatively inert to the environment, to boot.
Combined with the fact that any battery-powered device becomes promptly useless once their charge has been depleted, which might lead to more impromptu disposals, and it’s not hard to see why they might accumulate in the guttery.
FWIW, I live in Portland, OR and haven’t noticed any noteworthy concentration of battery waste.
Kids and their portable games. Those things eat batteries, and if you’re not clever enough to use rechargeable batteries, you are going to go through a lot of them. And, we all know how conscientious kids are with their trash.
These still take disposable batteries? For some reason I thought Nintendo DSs and their ilk were like cell phones & iPods with their rechargeable power cells…
Well, if people are discarding many, many AA batteries, you’re looking for an appliance that runs on them, is ubiquitous, and, if it fails, is going to have its batteries replaced on the spot.
Given that you’re in SF, I’m gonna go with digital cameras. A fair number of point&shoots use AA batteries and, if you’re not using rechargeable batteries, they die very quickly. (Mind you, I’m not even going to try to analyze the mind of someone who thinks the area is photogenic enough to take pictures, but doesn’t mind chucking trash in the gutter.) Some MP players and radios do run on AA batteries, so that’s another possibility. Toys are a reasonable guess, because not only are they going to go through a tremendous number of batteries, but one can easily see how whipping batteries out of a car window might be amusing for kids. Finally, I suppose those battery-powered emergency cell-phone chargers might contribute.
The other consumers of AA batteries seem less likely – limited numbers of people are going to be wandering the streets of SF with flashlights, hand-held GPS receivers or other, more dubious buzzing appliances. (That last sentence may just indicate my lack of familiarity with certain districts of SF).
Sorry to hijack your post…but you may want to point out to your friend that his “hobby” may not be the safest thing in the world. Most of these wheel weights are made of lead--a proven neurotoxin. Not something I’d want to handle a lot of, and I certainly wouldn’t keep any in my house! If anything, you may want to recommend that your friend not show off his collection to any young children.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.
That’s vaguely troubling. I will refrain from putting his wheel weight collection in my mouth and gargling.
In all seriousness, is a bucket filled with lead wheel weights 100 feet away from me cause for any real concern? I’m thankful for the warning, don’t get me wrong, but is it really a danger?
