10,000,000 Sony Batteries recalled 2006
22,000 Sony Batteries recalled 2004
205,000 Lenovo Batteries recalled 2007

10,227,000 Batteries in 3 major recalls, @ ~0.25 lb Li/battery = 3,056,750 pounds (1,528.38 tons) of Li "recovered" in recalls, but of course who knows what they did with the returned batteries.

NIST Market Info indicates that by 2002 more than 700,000,000 Li ion cells were produced, with approximately 200,000,000 of these being for PCs and 500,000,000 for power tools, both of which would be expected to have "large" batteries. For the last year for which data was found today, the "market" was growing at an annual rate of 3.7 percent, extrapolating to perhaps 809,200,000 cells per year by now(?).

Total 5-year production of "large" cells of approximately 3.5 BILLION (3.5*10⁹) cells, which may be expected to have produced (if discard rate equals replacement rate) 437,500 TONS of waste Li, the majority of which probably has been discarded in unregulated land fills, since Li batteries are considered "low toxicity" by most municipalities.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory, in 1955 (LA-1882: THE TOXICOLOGY OF LITH1UM COMPOUNDS) calculated that the lethal quantity¹ for a single human ingestion of Lithium was approximately 8 grams. At this toxicity level, one pound of Li is capable of killing approximately 50 persons, with the implication that there is sufficient discarded Lithium in unregulated landfills and other largely uncontrolled waste repositories to produce

43,700,000,000 deaths worldwide.

Unfortunately, once the batteries are discarded and reach the disposal sites, casualties cannot be expected to affect only "yuppies with laptops."

¹ Human data largely from a test of Li-Cl as a salt substitute for persons on low-sodium diets.

This travesty has been only minimally addressed by manufacturers or by government agencies, with the only visible result of awareness of this extreme hazard being the packaging of new Li batteries in transparent plastic packaging prominently marked with "DO NOT EAT CONTENTS."



Both the US NIOSH and Canadian occupational health agencies have fairly easily accessible hazard data sheets on commercially available DU and products made from DU. Reading a couple is suggested. The previous two threads linked in the first post here also include a fair representation of several aspects of the subject of DU munitions.

John