Charged Up About Battery Recycling

I recently loaded my truck bed with all the depleted or broken goods I’ve collected over the past few months, like empty ink cartridges, frayed phone chargers, and that broken hairdryer we couldn’t fix. The good people of my local Conservation Corps collect these items twice a month, but if I plan it right, I can arrange to visit them no more than once a quarter, or roughly as often as I consider shaving my legs. I guess what I’m saying is, I had a pretty good Saturday. 

One thing they don’t accept at the neighborhood dropoff is batteries, and somehow I always have a lot of spent ones. I don’t like this. Batteries give me the shivers. Touching them makes me feel radioactive; even thinking about them right now is making my fingers zing. I wonder if I might be a little magnetic, or hypersensitive to electricity, or something else special. (I’m not. I checked the internet: At most I have an oversensitive imagination.) 

Undercover Recycler

Given that I can’t shuffle my battery waste off on the Conservation Corps, I usually smuggle them into my husband’s work bag so he can recycle them at his office. Batteries are heavy, but if I sneak them in a few at a time over, say, a week, I can make him think his muscles are gradually weakening. He’s happy to take them, of course, and I don’t have to trick him. I just like to. 

Never would I ever throw a battery in the trash, and not only because I would miss the challenge of gaslighting my husband. Putting batteries in the garbage is illegal in California, and an all-around icky thing to do. As a country—and a world—we need to do better with battery disposal because, like most waste, old batteries don’t disappear. Messaging about their impact is often unclear or inconsistent, varied by region, and not carefully enforced. If you ask me, we should be yelling about this all the time. In a good way.

Put Out to Pasture

Consider the obvious: after they’ve lived a full life powering your child’s retro Teddy Ruxpin or your back massager or, I don’t know, facilitating your days-long text argument about the correct interpretation of a particular Decemberists lyric, batteries and their by-products go on to live a very long afterlife in places where they don’t belong, like our groundwater.

Follow the path of a battery that’s carelessly tossed in the trash and you might end up in a landfill, where it short-circuits and starts a fire, or where toxic heavy metals leach into soil—including soil where food is grown, and upon which fragile ecosystems depend. Another discarded battery, or many thousands of them, might end up in a waterway where they degrade and pose a health threat to any living thing that comes into contact with them. 

Zing Me, Baby, One More Time

Americans throw out billions of batteries every year, creating hundreds of thousands of tons of hazardous waste, and that’s reason enough to recycle. But there’s another really good reason. Fact One: We go digging for metals to make batteries in the first place. Fact Two: We can reuse the metals in batteries when their juice runs out. Get where I’m going with this? More recycling equals less mining. I’ll say it again: recycle more, mine less. It’s happy math, unlike what you stayed up late to study in high school. 

Boil my rant down to three points and you’ll get these: (1) Yes, you need to recycle your old batteries, all of them; (2) Our system isn’t great yet, and we need to seriously streamline and aggressively promote it; and (3) Recycling batteries isn’t hard to do. Businesses like Target, Lowe’s, and many others put out collection bins, and you can find a collector near you with a quick internet search. 

Be a Battery Ambassador

Start with Call2Recycle. Then tell a friend. Start working it into conversations, like: “I’ll meet you in 15–I just have to drop off my batteries to recycle first. . . .” It’s chic and edgy, and soon, when everyone is doing it, you can claim your cred as part of the vanguard. 

So, let’s go, 2025! This year I personally re-commit to responsible disposal of batteries and e-waste (disposable coffee cups, I will see you in hell another episode), and I’m taking you with me. Not because I don’t think you know how to do it, but because I love a shared experience, especially a tedious one. There’s at least a small chance that one of us will find a way to make it fun.