Obviously a bad idea but is there any truth to it?
I can’t imagine that the relatively tiny amount of zinc in a flashlight battery would have any affect on the soot from a fireplace. As for the colors, it will totally do that, although you can also buy the little packs they make to throw in campfires if you want to avoid giving yourself cancer.
I’d give it a maybe. If we’re talking about pure metallic colors like when you burn copper its green, probably safe. But anything can come with additives including Lead or other heavy metals.
several grams isnt tiny amount. zinc is, like it or not, a toxic heavy metal, sure, not as toxic as cadmium or thallium, but it can and will fuck up several things if released
and then you have batteries containing nickel, mercury, cadmium, lithium, lead,
I can’t imagine that the relatively tiny amount of zinc in a flashlight battery would have any affect on the soot from a fireplace
That’s why you would want to start by dumping a huge box of batteries in the fire.
I don’t know much about batteries, but by a relatively tiny amount, are you talking about today’s batteries or those from 100+ years ago when this tip was published?
Those would have been D batteries, most likely. I also don’t know how much zinc was in those, how much zinc is too much to burn, or if the composition of batteries was the same then as now. Rather curious about all this. Also I was taught batteries can explode in fire – was that a myth? Any battery experts in the chat?
As far as I can tell, the zinc itself wouldn’t be particularly harmful (at least, not moreso than inhaling any other metal vapors). The nasty stuff would be manganese dioxide, which is a main component in zinc-carbon, zinc-chloride, and alkaline batteries. Generally, non-rechargable batteries won’t “explode” in a fire, but they will puncture and leak chemicals everywhere, which isn’t great. Lithium batteries, on the other hand, will absolutely explode and should be kept far away from anything that could damage them.
The first flashlight batteries were entirely zinc casings because it was the negative electrode.
They had a carbon rod (anode) and manganese oxide wrapper and were filled with ammonium chloride electrolyte.
Burning the ammonium chloride might have been the most dangerous part, not sure if that could release chlorine gas or not, but probably not with most fires.
Zinc fumes alone are pretty terrible to breath though. Welders can get sick for a couple days if they weld galvanized steel without cleaning it well. Supposedly drinking milk helps the symptoms, but I’ve avoided it so far.
now that i’m thinking about it: not zinc, but maybe manganese. if you add a little of ferrocene to diesel, it’ll burn (ie on a wick) without soot. ferrocene here works as a source of small amounts of very fine iron oxide particles, which catalyze burning of soot. manganese could work like this, but this works only if you provide enough air in the first place
the fact that this also works for rocket fuels made ferrocene a highly watched substance in cold war (alternative is very fine iron oxide - but you need more of it. this is used in space shuttle solid fuel)
