An Easy Win For Earth Day

Good Stewardship (of Lithium Batteries)
“The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” Genesis 2:15

I have never met a Christian who thinks pollution, littering, or waste are a good thing. Right, left, or center politically, old or young, protestant or Catholic-everyone objects to needless waste. Even Christians who love cars and appreciate the sound of a 5MPG V10 engine (like me) don’t want to see the environment harmed needlessly. But sometimes, it feels unavoidable.

In virtually every market in America, sustainable and affordable are antonyms. We all know that fruits and vegetables in the “organic” section will cost more than the same produce that was raised with pesticides without checking. Clothing made in countries with ethical labor laws costs five times more than the same clothing potentially made in sweatshops or using child labor. Harbor Freight will sell you an entire 300-piece Chinese-made tool set for the cost of two pairs of German pliers. There are nine new internal combustion engine car models available in America with a base MSRP below $20,000, but the cheapest all-electric vehicle is more than $25k, with the majority costing more than $40k.
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Given recent inflation and price hikes and the 12-month net negative market performance, it feels insensitive to ask people to commit to more environmentally friendly choices. The Bible tells us that we are to be stewards of God’s creation (Gen. 1.28), not polluting our land (Num. 35:33) and caring for the animals in it (Prov 12:10), but how can we ask people to spend even more to sustain the environment when they’re having trouble sustaining themselves?

What if we didn’t have to choose? What if there was a sustainable thing you could do with minimal effort, that would actually save you money and time, or give you a better outcome for the same price than what you are already doing? What if there was an environmental “win” that would allow you to breathe easier financially and literally? There is. Which brings me to the subject of this article: Batteries.

​You’re probably using lithium-ion batteries in a way that shortens their lifespan and makes them hold less energy. Everything you you own that has a lithium battery in it or on it—your iPad, your laptop, your phone, your wireless earbuds, your smartwatch, your leaf blower, your drill, your toothbrush, your electric bicycle or scooter—you’re likely using all of them inefficiently, and it’s costing you hundreds or thousands of unnecessary dollars, and hurting the planet. The way you use these batteries is causing them to keep your phone or laptop powered for shorter and shorter lengths of time every day, conveniently driving you to become frustrated by frequent low-battery warnings and purchase a newer model of device years sooner than you should.

Lithium-ion batteries are a Nobel Prize winning technology that stores and release energy through a chemical reaction. If your high school chemistry is a little rusty, chemical reaction rates usually happen on a logarithmic curve: Very quickly at the beginning, slower in the middle, and at a comparatively glacial place at the end, as the last reactants, now in very low concentrations relative to the product, interact with each other less frequently. This is why your cell phone goes from 1% to 25% charge faster than it goes from 95% to 100%. ​

Driving the reaction to 100% completion is actually stressful for battery components, as is holding the battery at 100% charge without discharging it for any length of time. This is why Tesla and other EV’s, whose battery packs can cost $20,000 and whose premature replacement is often the responsibility of manufacturers under warranty, have software in the car that asks you to select how much of a charge you want to put in your battery, and encourages you not to put in more of a charge than you need for your next drive.

Logically, you might assume that charging a battery to 33% 3 times would have the same effect on its lifespan as charging it to 99% once, but because of the significantly greater heat and energy required to drive the chemical reaction in the battery backward those final few percent, this is not the case. Researchers have found that even charging your batteries to as high as 80% capacity, but not (often) beyond, will increase the lifespan of the battery by four times. Now, imagine what would happen if you regularly limited the charge on your phone or drill or toothbrush to 60%?

That sounds like good news for you, but you may have noticed that, unlike in electric cars, there is no charge limiting software for tablets, headphones, power tools, or your phone. In fact, most users charge their batteries back to 100% after use, and leave the device in that state until the next time it’s used. This is the battery equivalent of telling a person to do push-ups or  Manufacturers love this if your battery is no longer under warranty, because the weakening of your exhausted batteries is another factor driving you to buy replacement devices or parts.

Although this problem isn’t widely discussed, enough people know about it that a few products have cropped up to help. Predictably, the sustainable options are much more expensive than their ordinary counterparts. You can spend $32 per phone for a special charging plug and app that work in tandem to manage the charge state of your phone and prevent the battery from wearing prematurely. It works well, but it’s over $30 and only works for your phone; it doesn’t do anything for your laptop, headphones, etc. A similar device, the cycle satiator, is available for the large batteries on electric bikes, scooters, and unicycles, but it costs nearly $350 and can’t charge your tools, phone, or laptop.

So what can you do? You can’t stay up to unplug your phone when it gets to 60% at 2AM. You can’t buy one of these sustainable charging devices for every device, and the ones you can purchase are expensive. Are you supposed to babysit your drill batteries on the jobsite, or remember to pull the plug on your laptop when you’re focused on deadlines and meetings? Are you doomed to prematurely exhaust your batteries and add to the significant pollution of lithium mining as the price of being part of the wireless age? 

​Fortunately, there’s a much easier solution, that will have your years-old phone lasting a whole day on half a charge, and overnight on the rare occasion you need a 100% charge during camping or travel. For just $12.00, Amazon sells an "analogue outlet timer" (I have no affiliation with the seller or Amazon and won't directly link it here; many versions exist) that lets you time the power flow from your outlet in increments between 15 minutes and 6 hours with the push of a button. 

Once you get to know your device and how long it takes to get to a certain charge level from its typical state of depletion (say, your phone at bedtime), simply plug your charger into the outlet timer, set it for the desired number of hours, then go to sleep, knowing that the charger will automatically shut down whatever is plugged into it in the time you have allotted. If this device quadrupled the life expectancy of just one of your lithium batteries, it would pay for itself several times over. But it has the potential to do that for every device you own which charges off a standard outlet. I have used this same method to keep everything from the large batteries for my electric cargo bike to the tiny battery in my smartwatch running like-new for years, by calculating how much charge time each needs after particular trips or times away from the charger, then delivering that and nothing more.

Remember, it’s a forgiving process: If you accidentally charge to 90% once, that’s better than doing it daily. If you store your batteries at 70% charge by accident, that is vastly better than storing them at 100% all the time. When you need all the energy storage the battery is capable of, it’s still available. When you don’t, you can smile knowing you’ve saved yourself hundreds of dollars, outsmarted big tech companies, and reduced your dependence on rare-earth mineral mining and electronics disposal, two heavily polluting industries. That’s an easy win!