Supposedly disposable, Alkaline batteries, still very present in our daily lives, are not really single-use batteries. Karl Kordesch, one of the inventors of the alkaline battery, demonstrated in the early 1980’s that these batteries could actually be regenerated and developed with the company Rayovac a device able to regenerate alkaline batteries up to 25 times ! Unfortunately, after few years on the market, the device disappeared…
Had we followed his guidelines, we probably could have significantly reduced the amount of electronic waste produced by alkaline batteries as well as as their environmental impact by now. In our context of changing legislation on planned obsolescence, now seems to be the perfect time for the paleo-energetic team to investigate the real regenerability of these inefficient batteries (an alkaline battery requires about 50 times more energy for its manufacture than it will deliver in use) thus giving a new birth to the topic of alkaline batteries’ re-usability.
As a first proof of concept of Paleo-energetic research, we decided to reactivate this old patent and created RegenBox : an open-source alkaline battery regenerator also able to test and create data about alkaline batteries from the market.
