When batteries don't work any more, and we are so wasteful as not to have bought the rechargeables, we should throw them away, right? Wrong.
They are not so good in the landfill, so you need to hunt around to find the battery recycling in your neighborhood, and its just an itsy bitsy little thing, and that's so much trouble, and you just never get around to it, and so those discarded batteries pile up in the kitchen drawer, don't they?
So, rather than throw them out and feel guilty, here is a clever invention that takes account of both that laziness, and that guilt, and finds an elegant solution.
Even when batteries don't work any more, they actually they have some juice left, apparently. Not enough to power what they did before, but enough to power an efficient LED, together with that little bit of juice left in a bunch of other used-up batteries, that is.
How about dropping them in a recycling system right on every street? To make a good reason for cities to put in these recycling battery containers to recycle them, lets see...how about using the batteries to power a streetlight? Two birds with one stone. That's the idea behind a young designer's Energy Seed idea, a street lamp powered by discarded batteries.
You would simply drop your used batteries down the tube of the Energy Seed (like seeding the ground, get it?) and once the batteries pile up in a long enough line they would light up the LED on top.
If anyone wants to market this excellent idea, contact the talented South Korean designer Sung Woo Park who created this Energy Seed.
Actually it would work even better marketed as a porch light just for your own front door instead of the street, as you'd just buy one at Home Depot.
So many fewer steps to dispose of those old batteries.
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