Making a Living from Secondary Lead

Health and safety reasons have spurred the lead battery industry to become one of the most thorough in its creation of a closed-loop recycling system. Although that loop has been established with a 94 percent North American recycling rate, that doesn’t mean it has given secondary lead an economic advantage over primary product.

“In primary mining, lead is a by-product [of other mining efforts] and is always coming onto the market, often at zero cost,” Brian McIver of Nova Pb, Ville Ste. Catherine, Quebec, told attendees of a session at the Canadian Solid Waste and Recycling Expo in Toronto last week.

McIver, who is vice president-commercial affairs for the secondary lead production company, said his company is constantly striving to keep operating costs down while also looking for ancillary income opportunities so it can continue to accept scrap auto batteries and keep the industry’s loop closed.

McIver urged attendees of the session at which he spoke, which was sponsored by the Canadian Association of Recycling Industries (CARI), to let the Canadian federal government know it can do more to “incentify” green purchasing, which could help companies like Nova Pb that make a secondary product compete with subsidized mining efforts.

Nova Pb’s recycling process involves recycling not only the lead portion of incoming scrap batteries, but also the polypropylene plastic casings surrounding batteries. McIver says Nova Pb and other companies have been successful working with manufacturers to accept the scrap plastic for use in the making of new auto parts, such as armrests or exterior fascia (parts near the bumper).

At Nova Pb’s Ville Ste. Catherine facility, which is about 30 miles from Montreal, a rotary kiln fueled in part by used motor oil re-melts the scrapped battery lead to create new secondary sows or ingots.

The 50 percent of the kiln’s energy needs coming from waste oil is derived in part from Nova Pb’s oil filter recycling program. The facility processes used oil filters and creates both a scrap steel product from the casings and wrings out oil in the process that is used to fire the kiln.