What to do with Dead Batteries?

What do you do with your dead (or dying) batteries? I'm talking anything from AAA to 9 volt to Lithium-Ion to laptops to watches to car batteries. The average household has 80-100 batteries within its walls. Batteries are everywhere around us. Filled with metals and chemicals, some toxic, some not so much. But what do we do with them at the end of their life? Do they just go in the garbage?

Batteries in the Garbage

In some jurisdictions, batteries are frozen, crushed and then tossed in the landfill. Despite containing valuable metals, it's just not cost-effective to pick most batteries apart for these jurisdictions. At least not yet.

But this tossing of batteries is very short-sighted. Batteries will corrode and leak toxic elements into the groundwater, things like cadmium, silver, lead, mercury and nickel. This is obviously NOT a good idea - contaminated soil and groundwater is a long-term problem.

Car Batteries

Filled with lead and acid, these batteries need special handling. Your friendly neighbourhood car repair shop may take these free of charge especially if you are buying a new battery from them. Most transfer stations, landfills, and some recycling centres will also take car batteries.

But then what? Do they actually get "recycled" or just deactivated and dumped? Well... it's actually kind of fascinating... You can watch this YouTube video if you're super interested! But basically... they get all crunched up and then stuff gets sifted out...

• 99% of the lead in car batteries is recovered during the smelting process and is recycled or sold as a commodity
• 100% of the sulphuric acid is recovered and either recycled, sold as a commodity or neutralized for disposal.
• Plastics (the housing of the battery) - recycled and sold as a commodity

There is no need to have a garden shed or garage you (or your aged male relative) stockpiles dead car batteries. They are much easier to dispose of nowadays. Same with car tires. No need to dump these out in the bush. That's just wrong.

Recycling Household Batteries

There are scads of places that accept used household batteries, everything from Staples to Home Depot. But what actually happens with the recycled batteries? Is this just a "feel-good" way of tossing them into a landfill?

Nope... more on that later... but for now... here's a list of places that accept old household batteries. And, in case you're wondering... batteries do NOT go into your blue bin. Just don't. You're basically tossing them in the garbage.

So... here in BC... you can recycle household batteries at places like:

• Home Depot
• Home Hardware
• London Drugs
• Staples
• Canadian Tire
• Rona
• Best Buy
• Recycling Depots - where you also bring styrofoam, plastic bags, used paint, etc.

But then what? You dump them in the bin at the recycling depot or at Staples and... where do they go?

Call2Recycle Canada

All of the battery recycling in BC is under the umbrella of Call2Recycle Canada. They are the ones who come and collect the batteries from participating retailers and process them. Want to know where a recycling collection point is for your area? Just type in your postal code on the Call2Recycle site and you'll get a list of places.

So what actually happens to your batteries? Well, they are sent to a recycling centre where they are sorted according to size and type. After that, they are sent to processing centres.

Nickel-based batteries, for example are sent to Sudbury. Depending on the battery type, they are then either melted, or ground into powder. The melting process allows the metals to be extracted. The single-use alkaline batteries are the ones ground into powder allowing the recovery of steel, nickel zinc, manganese and potassium. (Check out this YouTube video if you want to see the process.)

After that... the metals and/or materials are reused in different ways. The Call2Recycle site outlines the whole process and what happens to each type of battery.

I was a bit surprised when I saw that alkaline batteries are recycled into sunscreen and concrete aggregate! What the heck? Turns out the batteries contain zinc... and we all know that zinc goes into sunscreen. Whew.

Take-Away

The bottom line is... all batteries can be recycled. Don't throw any of them into the trash. Take them to a recycling centre/depot where they can be safely processed and converted into other products. No one else is going to do this for us. It's up to us to take that little bit of extra time and extract batteries from used devices (toys, watches, mobile phones, laptops, flashlights, remotes) and recycle them responsibly. We can do this.