How Much of Your Financial Misery is Battery Powered?
Written by Cassandra Garnett
June 17, 2018 |
With every battery powered device you add to your home, you're signing up for a lifetime subscription you may not realize.
Lots of stuff requires batteries. Weird stuff. Like door locks, thermostats, and even in socks to power miniature heating elements. Batteries wear out over time, and even rechargeable batteries eventually die. Replacing batteries is costing you every month, tethering you to a lifetime subscription on future costs for things that really, really don't need batteries. Subscription models are like an entry drug: once you're hooked, your money gets spent before you even earn it. Batteries force you to subcribe to not only replacement costs, but also costs associated with their inevitable disposal and the corresponding impact that has on the environment. The true cost of battery proliferation in new and weird devices is having a major impact on your financial misery.
Looking For Batteries In All The Wrong Places
Today, batteries power a huge number of devices, and with a future of internet enabled devices, more will follow. The acronym IOT refers to the Internet Of Things and lately it is getting a lot of buzz. The IOT pictures a future in which everything you own is connected to the internet and sending status updates to enormous data centers somewhere up in the cloud. The benefits IOT proponents tout include the ability for devices to automatically notify repairmen to come over and fix a fridge on the fritz.
Personally, I'm pretty shocked people actually want R&D dollars spent on devices that can make service calls. Wouldn't it be better to devote those R&D dollars to make a fridge that can't break down? I've accepted I'm on the losing end of that logic argument. People seem to want illogic, so I guess I need to just go with it.
To power all of these internet enabled devices, batteries will be the backbone. And that means batteries will end up in a lot of odd places. Like door locks and thermostats. And heated socks.
Subscription Models And Their Relationship To Debt
Adding a battery pack to your socks means that they now become a lot less portable. And that's a pretty odd downside to adding batteries to something because usually adding batteries is all about portability. When batteries were first added to things that made sense - like portable music players - the benefits to consumers were huge. But now, batteries are being wedged into products that just don't need them.
Behind this drive is money. Batteries wear out, and eventually they die. Like lettuce or milk, batteries are a perishable good. Unlike lettuce or milk, whose decomposition actually benefits the planet, the perishing of batteries is a recognized disaster. The cycle of sale and death of batteries is good for the bottom line, forcing consumers into an endless subscription to purchase batteries to power the devices that increasingly control their lives.
When most people think of a subscription, they think of paper products: like a magazine or newspaper subscription. And while both products do (or perhaps more accurately did) offer subscriptions, they are not the only products to which you subscribe. Every bill you pay each month is a subscription. Your cell phone is a subscription, even if you are smart enough to prepay. Even your parking pass is a subscription.
The danger with subscriptions is how easy it is to rope yourself into a commitment that earmarks your money before you even have a chance to earn it. By avoiding subscriptions, you are in control of where your money gets spent. Sure, on a unit basis, it might be more expensive to purchase a single newspaper. But you may not have the time to read a newspaper everyday. By having the choice to spend money on a good when you actually have the time to use it just makes sense. Subscriptions, however, flip that logic on its head, forcing you to pay for something regardless of whether or not it provides you any benefit.
When you spend money on things you don't even use, you increase the odds that you will go into debt to find the money for things you actually need. Subscriptions that are obvious, like a magazine or newspaper, can be cancelled to free up money for more pressing matters. But subscriptions you don't even notice, like the recurring money you spend on batteries, are much more difficult to eliminate.
Money, Mishaps and Mother Earth: The True Costs Of Batteries
Batteries have costs that go beyond your wallet. The subscription you pay for when replacing batteries each month is a drop in the bucket compared to the impact batteries can have to the mishaps they cause and the impact their disposal has on the environment. Airlines regularly deal with flight disruptions due to battery mishaps in the devices passengers keep in their luggage or bring with them to their seat. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) treats batteries as a separate classification of disposable goods, with special measures devoted specifically to their safe disposal. Those measures have independent costs, that you, as a taxpayer, fund. Despite the EPA's efforts, the overwhelming numbers of disposed batteries release toxins into the environment at an alarming rate.
On March 12, 2018, a Skywest flight preparing to depart from Salt Lake City, Utah grounded once the ground crew smelled a burning electrical smell. After removing all of the stored luggage, a bag was found containing two pairs of Lithium-ion battery heated socks, which had burned. Not only are socks less portable with the inclusion of batteries, apparently they are more flammable - probably not a risk you would normally associate with socks.
By halting the flight, every passenger on board was delayed from arriving at their destination. This mishap would have caused passengers to miss connecting flights, as well as appointments scheduled for when they had originally planned to arrive. And those delays were the happy ending: imagine the result if the socks had caught fire while the flight was in the air.
By some estimates, American consumers dispose of 3 billion batteries each year. Those batteries add 86,000 tons of waste to landfill sites each year. As batteries decompose or get crushed in the landfill, dangerous toxins get released into the environment. These toxins include mercury, nickel, cadmium, cobalt and lead. With each year of additional battery waste, the impact to the environment becomes more severe. In a world with battery proliferation due to the internet of things, a more appropriate moniker may soon be the landfill of things.
Summary
Subscription services are killing you and forcing you to stay in debt. Battery powered products are subscription services, except you don't realize the subscription you're paying for isn't a fun product or service. Batteries have costs that go far beyond the impact to your personal budget - your fellow travelers in airplanes and this planet are affected as well.
Do you have examples of places where batteries have been added that are very weird? How much do you spend each month on replacing batteries? Does that cost have a significant impact on your personal budget?