By  Paul Ploumis 15 Sep 2015  Last updated at  08:39:11 GMT

SPOKANE (Scrap Monster): Representatives from various e-scrap recycling companies held a meeting recently to develop a policy on laptop battery usage. The meeting was held on the sidelines of the recently concluded E-Scrap Conference 2015 held in Orlando, Florida.

According to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), there are several misconceptions among industry participants when it comes to reuse of laptop batteries, forcing them to shred functioning laptops even before their actual end-of-life. This results in significant revenue loss for e-scrap recycling companies.

The industry participants decided to work together in order to formulate a policy to address sale of laptop batteries, the sale of batteries with batteries and the sale of batteries without batteries. The policy will be arrived at by taking into consideration the current market conditions. It is also expected to address the issues related with wholesale and retail sale of various product categories involving laptop batteries. The participants also discussed on launching of a program to enhance the reusability of laptop batteries, by defining the capacity percentage that batteries should possess in order to qualify for re-use.

Under Basel Convention rules, a laptop battery is considered to be working and reusable component of a computer only if it holds at least one hour of battery life. Batteries that fail to meet the above condition are deemed non-working and are considered as unfit for reuse. The Partnership on Computing Equipment (PACE) is currently working on the issue of potential battery life to consider the batteries as eligible for re-use. According to PACE, the one-hour limit has become an impediment to reuse and hence further lowering of battery life requirement is essential to improve legitimate reuse.