Recycling Household Batteries

Why recycle household batteries?
Some household batteries contain chemicals like lead, mercury or cadmium. If batteries are thrown into your normal rubbish bin, they are likely to end up in landfill. Once buried, the batteries start to break down, and can leak some of these chemicals into the ground. This can cause soil and water pollution, which may be a health risk for humans.Recycling avoids this and can also help recover some of the raw materials used for making batteries. These can be used to make other products. So recycling can save some of the planet’s resources, by reducing the need to mine new materials.
What happens to the used batteries?
Recycled batteries are first sorted into different types, for example lithium, alkaline, lead cell, mercury button, as each type is recycled differently.
Lead acid batteries (used for car batteries) and mercury button cell batteries (the flat, round, silver batteries found in watches) are fully recycled in the UK.
Lithium and alkaline batteries (AA, AAA and 9v batteries) are part-recycled in the UK, and then sent to plants abroad for the rest of the process.
Other types of battery are sent abroad, as the UK does not currently have plants that can recycle these.
How to recycle car batteries
Car batteries are treated as hazardous waste. They must not be thrown away with your household waste. They can be recycled at garages, scrap metal facilities and many local waste and recycling centres.
There is a helpful postcode finder which you can use to check where you can recycle car batteries, and all other types of waste on the Recycle Now website.
http://www.recyclenow.com/what_can_i_do_today/can_it_be_recycled/index.html