What Happens When A Battery’s Life Is Over? A New Children's Book Has Answers

Ooze

By Trupti Godbole, Govind Mukundan, Poonam Bir Kasturi

Batteries are innocuous things. They are ubiquitous in our electronically powered lives. That new toy. The new coffee whisk. The many remote controls. Two for the air-conditioner. Two for the television and two for the cable set top box. Sometimes you feel you’re constantly buying new batteries and chucking dead ones.

But what happens when a battery’s life is over? Most people just toss it into the dustbin and it becomes someone else’s problem. But now a set of two new picture books – Junior Ooze and Senior Ooze – are here to tell you what exactly happens when a battery drains dead.

Published by Daily Dump, a waste solution company based out of Bengaluru, the set of books are written by Trupti Godbole, Govind Mukundan and Poonam Bir Kasturi. The junior book is illustrated by Ishan Ghosh and the senior one by Girish T.S.

Junior Ooze is the story of a pair of siblings – a boy’s little sister is fascinated by his toy robot. She would love to bite it, but he knows better. Because as he explains, batteries ooze harmful chemicals and you can’t reuse them. At the end, his mother puts the batteries into an e-waste bin.

Senior Ooze is about a boy who gets a remote-controlled car on his birthday. To his dismay, his mum confiscates the batteries one day, so he sneaks around the house and gets cells from other gadgets. The ones that don’t work, he throws away. But what happens to those dead cells? That’s when Girish T.S. illustrations bring the story to life – with some really cool illustrations of zombie cells that come alive and “kill through water, land and air”. The book goes on to explain the components of an alkaline battery, the lifecycle of a lithium ion battery, and safe ways to dispose them.

The books are extremely informative and well-intentioned. The rhymes though feel quite unnecessary, the notes sometimes jarring the reading experience. It also would have been great to have had some stronger girl protagonists in the books.

But despite all of that, the pages are power packed with information. Like a spotting game on what household objects need batteries to run and what material is reusable and what isn’t, as well as an experiment that young readers can conduct in their homes. In fact, it’s the back pages that will make children think, ask question, and act. And hopefully it will also get adults to do the same.

The biggest thing the books manage to make you do is to think about the chemicals hidden inside electronic products and toxicity in our daily lives. It makes everyday chemistry much more accessible and helps break down the complex subject of e-waste as well. And what a great title.

Images via Daily Dump.