proper battery disposal

I’m here today to talk you to about household hazardous waste disposal.   This is an especially important topic due to the extreme impact that toxins and heavy metals (mercury, cadmium, lead, etc., etc. ) can have on our environment and our health.  In my opinion, it is *essential* that waste items containing such substances are recycled or disposed of properly.

So Norm sent me this very informative link on where to responsibly dispose of a wide variety of hazardous waste materials in SF at Recology.

As you can see, a very wide variety of common, everyday household items are considered hazardous waste.   Batteries are particularly ubiquitous.   I use rechargeable AA and AAAs frequently, and rechargeables are DEFINITELY the way to go if you want to run portable devices regularly, but still minimize waste as well as save money over conventional batteries.  But things like remote controls and smoke detectors are usually most practically operated by using  the conventional disposable kind.  This is because rechargeables are an expensive inital outlay and the cost benefit of recharging them many times is not realized in a relatively static, low power application like smoke alarms and IR emitting remote controls.  Rechargeables really show their worth in relatively high duty cycle, high drain applications like very bright, high-drain flashlights that are used often, handheld video games, and guitar signal processors like the Korg Pandora and especially the Tascam GT-CD1 Guitar Trainer.  If you used regular batteries instead of rechargeables in such applications, you would be going through and disposing of A LOT of batteries over time.

I know it’s not practical to run down to the disposal center every time you replace a dead 9V battery.   So what we’ve done in my office is set up a box for which people are free to bring in dead batteries from home.  It’s a good sized box, and it’s filling up.  At some point I will bring it in to properly dispose of all those dead batteries in one trip, and I’ll do it when I’m out running errands anyway.  This box has given our staff an easy, simple way to avoid chucking their batteries in the garbage.   My wife’s work also has a similar battery disposal program run by their maintenance manager, and they have around 50 employees.

Batteries aren’t supposed to go in the garbage.

See all these batteries?  They would’ve gone in the garbage, and eventually possibly in our water supply or in our soil.

– Guinea Dave