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East Penn Manufacturing has launched a campaign to build awareness about the role consumers play in recycling lead batteries.
The Berks County-based East Penn has been manufacturing lead batteries since 1946 — and has been recycling them for nearly as long. The recycling story is one the company believes needs to be told.
According to Joel Brady, assistant vice president of marketing at East Penn, the company had a soft launch of the Power2Recycle campaign a few months ago.
As a website about the campaign was being built, the company began sharing information on YouTube and other social media platforms, an effort Brady estimates has reached 1.5 million people.
“Even though we’ve been doing this for a long time and the industry has been doing this for a long time, it is amazing how many people just don’t know about the recyclability of the product,” he said, adding that lead batteries can be virtually 100% recycled.
“People should feel good about that and should be aware of that. And we have found a lot of them aren’t,” he added.
The broader rollout of the campaign, Brady said, was tied to East Penn’s December validation by Underwriters Laboratories, or UL, of the company’s full line of transportation batteries, with an allocation of 98% recycled material.
East Penn’s battery recycling process includes just lead batteries.
Brady said the Power2Recycle campaign is a new approach to letting consumers know that “they’re a part of this system — they’re a part of this story,” Brady said.
He added that the recycling process is a team effort that includes consumers taking product back to East Penn customers, who then get it back to East Penn for recycling.
“If somebody doesn’t play their role, it doesn’t work right. And we need it to work right. We need products that can be recyclable and create new resources and new raw material,” Brady added. “We really want people to be aware and informed of what they support, especially if it’s for environmental and sustainability purposes.”
Brady said East Penn was reinvigorated by the UL validation of its claim.
“We base our business on this,” Brady said, adding that founder DeLight Breidegam started manufacturing batteries and turning old ones into new ones, “because he could.”
“The technology lends itself to do that,” Brady said. “The more people recognize that — they can sort through the environmental claims and make decisions about which ones to support that really protect sustainability.”
East Penn Manufacturing has a recycling facility on the site of its Berks County campus — processing 30,000 lead batteries each day, according to information on the company’s website.
Brady said the lead battery recycle rate is about 99% in the U.S. — a result the Power2Recycle campaign aims to protect, to “make sure people have a good understanding of what they’re doing and why it’s important.”
Brady said the company started with awareness because that is where it could have the biggest impact, adding East Penn will continue to build on the campaign.
Another component of the campaign is a message to East Penn employees.
“We really try to reach out to employees to let them know how important their role within building and recycling a product is in this process,” Brady said, adding that not all of the company’s workers are aware.
“We’ve created our own term — Manucycling — which goes to show the symmetry between what we have made with the manufacturing and recycling process. Having the manufacturing complex and a recycling site right next to it, allows us to make this process really efficient,” he said.
“If you can take those batteries, recycle them, get those raw materials and pump them right back into the manufacturing facility, it really saves energy and it helps reduce transportation costs and gets the raw materials right back into the process. It’s not just awareness for the public but for us internally, too.”
Founded in 1946 by DeLight Breidegam Jr. and DeLight Breidegam Sr., East Penn Manufacturing has grown from a one-room shop with five employees into the largest single-site lead battery manufacturer in the world, with more than 10,000 employees. Its main lead battery manufacturing plant spreads over 520 acres in Berks and produces about 40 million batteries each year for automotive and other transportation uses.
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