The Battery Queen’s Passion
Her husband threatened to divorce her. Her son is embarrassed to come home. Her business is a shambles. Everyone thinks she is mad.
But Tian Guirong has been infatuated with the martyrs of the Communist revolution for too long to worry about personal interest. She is now a self-anointed soldier in China’s grass-roots green revolution. Her mission: collect used batteries before they can unleash their poison on a battered Motherland, already one of the world’s most polluted countries.
So far, she has spent $3,000--an astonishing figure in a province where the average person makes about $500 a year--buying 40 tons of spent batteries that would otherwise have been tossed into the garbage or a river. The batteries fill her living room, her brother’s balcony, her mother’s house, a shack in her home village and a warehouse at a local factory.
Everyone is nagging her to move the heaps somewhere else. But China lacks a nationwide battery-recycling network. So far, Tian can’t find an environmentally safe burial site for the batteries, which contain toxic chemicals. She absolutely refuses to give in to suitors offering big bucks to retrieve the usable metal parts and toss out the poison.
“They are like unmarriageable daughters,” said Tian, staring at one avalanche of batteries. “I worry about them night and day. There are so many of them I can line them up all the way to the Great Wall.”
China, the world’s top producer and consumer of batteries, churns out more than 15 billion every year--roughly half of them for export. That’s a far cry from the lean days when customers had to bring in used batteries in order to buy new ones.
While developed countries are making less-harmful alkaline batteries now, China still manufactures the cheaper, more toxic mercury-based variety, sold mainly on the domestic market. New regulations are in place to halt the use of mercury in the next few years, but the proliferation of illegal factories and counterfeiters makes enforcement a steep challenge.
Tian, 50, discovered the evils of batteries two years ago when she read that a single one could poison 150,000 gallons of water. That’s practically a lifetime supply of drinking water for a healthy adult, Tian thought.
The statistic freaked her out. She had begun selling batteries in Xinxiang, in central China’s impoverished Henan province, after a lifetime as a cotton farmer. Now, she knew, she had to rectify a problem she had helped create.
Her battle has been uphill. Environmental consciousness in China remains dramatically out of sync with the country’s economic transformation. In two decades of breakneck growth, China’s gross domestic product has skyrocketed, but at a grave cost.
Eight of the top 10 most polluted cities in the world are in China, according to the World Health Organization. Nearly 2 million people die every year from air and water pollution. It’s not unusual for entire villages to be sickened with diseases traceable to industrial runoffs in the water supply. In addition, deforestation and soil erosion have led to deadly floods and severe shrinkage of the country’s limited arable land.
“The environment has been a secondary priority compared to the task of feeding China’s huge population,” said Li Jinhui, an environmental engineering professor at Beijing’s Qinghua University. “We are just beginning to tackle the difficult problem of hazardous waste.”
Help from the government will be critical, experts say, because there is little economic incentive for individuals or businesses to recycle. Meanwhile, hundreds of grass-roots environmental organizations have sprung up in the last decade, mostly around urban centers and within universities. They put pressure on the state and raise awareness among the masses.
The heroes of this fledgling green movement are ordinary people, like Tian, who turn personal awakenings into public battle cries against a great wall of ignorance and indifference.
“If we were millionaires, then sure, I’d support her,” Fan Haitao, Tian’s 24-year-old son, said from a stripped-down living room lighted by a 10-watt bulb. “But we’re not. We have no furniture. We burn coal to save money. The only electrical appliances we own are this small black-and-white TV and that beat-up rice cooker.”
No one can believe that a family living in this condition is willing or able to fork out $3,000--spending one Chinese penny per battery, or about 0.12 cents--on a recycling campaign that so far has created only rusting piles everywhere. And those piles are growing: Even though Tian can’t afford to buy any more batteries, people keep leaving used ones on her doorstep.
But to Tian, a lifelong fan of communism and its martyrs, personal sacrifice is the only path to greatness.
“My son doesn’t understand me now, but his children will,” said Tian, looking and sounding the part of a Communist cadre: no makeup, no jewelry, a plain blue jacket--but enough energy to make a refrigerator hum. “For now, only Mother Earth understands me. Unfortunately, she can’t talk.”
Tian has a history of doing things that baffle others. Back on the farm where she was born and brought up, her husband was in charge of enforcing family planning in the village. He needed role models to launch a sterilization campaign. His wife--a mother of two--volunteered to be the first.
“She hates pain,” said her husband, Fan Ziyou, recalling the day his wife lay down on a primitive operating table.
“But I thought of my favorite [revolutionary] martyr, Liu Hulan,” Tian jumped in. “She had her head chopped off. All I was doing was getting my tubes tied!”
Yet those were the good old days.
Tian says she fell in love with her husband the first time she spotted him washing laundry in the river that runs through their home village, Hehe. It means the place where two rivers merge.
“The water was clear, the air was fresh, there was a huge willow tree next to him and purple mountains behind them. He was such a nice boy. It was picture perfect,” Tian reminisced as she stared out at the farmland that still surrounds her old village. “But now I’m old, the river is either black or dry, the air is dirty, and the mountains disappeared behind all that pollution.”
Hoping to eke out a better living, Tian and her family moved into nearby Xinxiang city in the early 1990s. Friends told her to get into the battery business. The city is one of the country’s leading producers of both real and counterfeit batteries--the latter a big headache for brands such as Duracell and Energizer.
Tian got some batteries and sold them on the sidewalk. Slowly, she saved enough money to open a tiny counter in a farmers market, and later a second one near a shopping center. Soon, locals were calling her the Battery Queen.
Then she got the green bug.
She custom-made hundreds of recycling bins and printed tens of thousands of posters. She designed expensive billboard ads and toured the country, like an environmental evangelist. She lectured at local schools and universities and went on radio shows and TV.
Most people praised her in public. But behind her back, they wondered how she could ever make a dent of difference.
“We were against her too because we live in a market economy now. Where’s the profit in what she’s doing?” said her husband.
Arguments dominated their life. She would run to the balcony and cry her heart out. She could hear the sound of other families playing mah-jongg or going about their lives. She wished her family peace, but she was in too deep.
“I finally said to him, ‘Fine, let’s divorce,’ ” Tian recalled. “ ‘You can go back home to be a farmer, and I’ll keep doing what I’m doing.’ ”
But her doggedness eventually touched her husband. Now he’s an avid supporter, holding the fort at home so his wife can travel.
But her son isn’t so easy. He can’t propose to his girlfriend until the family owns an apartment and some decent furniture. The way things are now, he won’t even bring her home.
Tian is not oblivious to the burden on her family. They don’t have a car, and last Chinese New Year’s, it took them two hours to hail a cab willing to take them back to their home village for the holidays. They stood in the snow like refugees, with their best possessions on their backs: some food and that old TV and a wok.
“I cried as we waited,” Tian said. “I knew if I hadn’t been obsessed with the batteries, we could have bought our own van by then and driven home ourselves.”
But still she proselytizes like the revolutionaries she worships.
“I’m a big admirer of Chairman Mao and the spirit of Lei Feng,” said Tian, referring to a model soldier who died serving the people. Tian is not a member of the party, “but even my son knows I do the work of a party member, sometimes more than the real Communists.”
