Personal Opinion Essay: Batteries In Everyday Life

Batteries are little circuits which can turn chemical energy into electricity. We use these in our everyday life, even though you may not think so. You have a phone right? Well everybody uses their phone at least once per week! Phones are powered by little batteries in their inner circuits. The point is that we overuse batteries. Some might be reusable but people throw them away because they don 't care or aren 't aware that what they are doing is wrong. And you might also be thinking 'and why should I care? ' We throw away 15 thousand billion batteries per year. 'Wow, wait, what? ' Yes, 15 000 000 000 000. That’s quite a sum, right? Well, less than 10% are recycled worldwide. Do you know where all the rest of the batteries go? They are burnt, buried deep into the earth or dumped into the ocean. This is extremely dangerous, not only for us but for other living creatures. As I mentioned before, we use batteries in many ways. Our society lives on batteries! No? We use batteries for everything: travelling, playing games and even liking a photo on Instagram… everything. I’m not insisting batteries are horrible. In some cases, using batteries can be very useful, like when we go travelling somewhere. Imagine having to go to visit your family which lives three hours away from you by foot. That would just be a pain! It would be

Renewable sources which are better for our environment have batteries in their systems. For example solar panels. We can’t stop using batteries but this doesn’t mean we can’t change the sort of batteries we use. Instead of using primary batteries which are batteries which can’t be recharged, we can use secondary batteries which are rechargeable. These still aren’t that exceptional yet they are better than normal batteries. Primary batteries are used once and then thrown away, whilst secondary or rechargeable batteries can be used 700 to 1000