Battery Council International celebrated its 100th anniversary on 21 March and BCI boss Roger Miksad told BEST there are two “pinnacle achievements” in BCI’s centenary history.
He said in a centenary interview: “The first is the creation of the BCI Group Size scheme, which brought sanity, particularly in the 1950s to the aftermarket replacement market.” That gave consumers the ability to buy the exact size battery to fit their car.
It was not so much a certified standard as a standardised naming nomenclature for battery sizes, he added.
The second crowning achievement was really incubating and creating the legal framework in the US for the 99% recycling system. “BCI was the driving force behind the legal framework for that. And it’s an unmatched and unparalleled recycling system in the world and for any product,” he claimed.
He said BCI has long punched above its weight in the industry because it is able to leverage its members work. “I think with more resources we could have done more advocacy and really telling the story of the industry to folks who don’t read battery industry trade rags.” (Rag? No offence taken, ed.)
Miksad acknowledged the criticism, also from within his association’s own ranks, that the lead battery industry still has to convince the world of its positive story.
He acknowledged lead as a metal has a reputation as a toxic substance and in the past was not always handled or used appropriately (lead paint, lead pipes, for example).
“But look, lead belongs in a battery and really nowhere else.” Can the industry do more? “I think we can always do more on behalf of our members in terms of telling the good story that they’ve developed.”
BCI is able to publish a centenary book, 100 Years of Industry Leadership, outlining all the highlights thanks in part to the record-keeping of one of its former leaders, Roger Winslow.
He founded Voltmaster Corporation in 1964 and served as president of the BCI board of directors from 1986 to 1988. Miksad said Winslow kept diligent records, which were rumoured to be vast.
He said: “Once I physically got out to Roger’s house, the archive was not as replete as rumour had it. That’s the best way to put it. It’s not that Roger was telling us it was more replete. It was the rumour that he had acres of stuff. He definitely had boxes and boxes, but not quite as voluminous an amount.
“But Roger himself is an archive in and of himself in terms of his memories of what has been going on in the associations since he started in the 1950s with us.”
Winslow’s archive consisted of newspaper cuttings as well as board minutes and conference records. He also had a copy of every Battery Man magazine from the 1950s.
The Independent Battery Manufacturers Association published The Battery Man magazine until the association folded in 2003. The magazine and other assets were merged into BCI, which carried on publishing the title for a couple of years before Energy Storage Publishing acquired it and folded it into BEST.