Trivia
HardCorn Farmers Purchase Micronutrients For Their Crops Made From What Unusual Source?
Answer: Batteries
If you dutifully recycle your old household batteries, you may wonder exactly where they end up at the end of the recycling road. If you were curious enough to dig into it (and we certainly were), you might be surprised to learn that a big chunk of the batteries you drop off at the local waste management company end up as corn fertilizer.
If that sounds a bit hard to swallow, let’s walk through the process of how a bucket full of batteries ends up sprinkled on soil used to grow corn. The batteries are taken to a recycling facility where they are sorted by type. Alkaline batteries, the most common type of household battery, are sent through a machine that pulverizes them in order to break them up into small pieces.
Those small pieces are then sent through a mechanical and chemical sorting process that separates the paper and steel exterior of the battery away from the elemental components in the battery like zinc, manganese, and potassium. Those three elements are then mixed into a micronutrient rich powder (or sometimes a liquid slurry) and applied to crop land to boost micronutrient levels in the soil and create more favorable growing conditions—thus completing a curious journey for the battery that took it from your flashlight to a field.
Trivia
EasyEarly 747 Airliners Had What Luxury In The First Class Cabin?
Trivia
EasyArtificial Grape Flavor Is Modeled After Which Grape Variety?
Trivia
HardWhich Country Is Second Only To The United States In Value Of Exported Foods?
Trivia
Very HardThe First Toilet Shown On Television Appeared In An Episode Of?
Trivia
HardRock’s Law Is An Observational Rule Of Computing That Covers?
Trivia
HardThe Most Widely Simulcast Television Show Of All Time Was An Episode Of?
Trivia
EasyWhich Scientist’s Notebooks Are Still Too Radioactive To Handle?
Trivia
HardWhat Was The First Video Game To Receive a “Mature” Rating?
Trivia
HardWhat Will Outnumber People By 2019?
Trivia
EasyIf You Have A Butt Load Of Something, How Much Of It Do You Have?