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atmosphear commented on an entry by sort77 titled "I'm absolutely SICK today" regarding make a smaller ecological footprint:

A rule of thumb is that converting anything into something else costs. Usually always the conversion loss comes out as heat: e.g. phone batteries get hot when they are charged. They will also emit heat when their energy is used by the phone, but this is done in such a long period of time that you won’t even notice it.

This is one very natural way of noticing entropy. We can organize penne tricolor into white, red and green, but it takes more energy than mixing them all back together. If we put them in one single container they will eventually end up mixed.

Charging a battery is sorting the electric potential in a certain way and using the stored chemical energy is about mixing the pastas. Every time the battery is charged we have to put more than we can get out of it.