EFFECTIVE LEAD RECYCLING

Avoiding waste, recovering usable materials, completing the recycling process – these are the present-day demands confronting all those involved in the industrial manufacture, sale or use of goods of whatever kind. But what we today combine in the short term "recycling" is in fact a much older practice than most people are aware of.

Lead can be justifiably described as the classic recycling metal. The first plants for recovering lead from used lead-acid batteries were established about 100 years ago. The initial motives were purely commercial, because lead was and remains a valuable raw material. In recent decades, the dramatic increase in road traffic has made ecological aspects more and more important. What remained the same was the requirement: to use lead, but not to consume it.

In Krautscheid (Germany) the history of lead recovery began in 1904. Where earlier iron, lead and copper ore had been mined and smelted, a secondary smelter was established which used scrap batteries and manufacturing wastes as its "raw material".

Today, Johnson Controls operates one of the most up-to-date lead recycling plants which has served as the model for similar recovery plants in Scandinavia, Belgium and Czech Republic, for example – and soon also in Russia and the Ukraine.