Interesting program on small electrical waste but it didn't mention this.
My local council recently accepted that ionisation smoke detectors should be treated as small electrical waste under the WEEE directive.
Unlike the mostly harmless waste the programme dealt with, millions of expired smoke detectors are likely to be going to landfill each year in the UK. They contain a very small amount of americium-241, a radioactive substance that emits alpha particles at similar energies to that of polonium-210, the substance used to assassinate Aleixandre Litvinenko.
While this is very safe inside the detector, the americium has a half-life of 432 years, remaining dangerous if ingested for thousands of years.
It's used because of this half life, meaning that most detectors are still as effective at the end of their ten year service life as they are at the beginning.
But how can we know what will happen to the tiny particles in their hundreds of millions in landfill? It strikes me that reuse, with recalibrated electronics every ten years would have a special advantage for these devices.
However, there is an additional problem. Some tests have raised doubts that ionisation detectors are effective at detecting the type of house fire that kills most people - smouldering fires as people sleep. To the extent that some Australian authorities have now mandated photoelectric detectors for new installations or replacements.
So, why are we tipping millions of potentially hazardous devices into landfill, when it seems likely they are not even very effective at doing what they are sold for?
I suspect there might be a whole program in investigating this issue. Or is it too hot for the BBC?
