You Can (and Should) Recycle Batteries. Here’s How.

For most of my young adulthood, I kept an empty pretzel container in the back of my closet that I filled with spent batteries. As my collection grew, I made myself feel better about this battery boneyard by imagining it as a tiny cabinet of curiosities—with corroded AAs, an assortment of button-cell batteries, and an old smartphone standing in for precious objets d’art and reticulated skeletons—but in reality I just didn’t know what to do with them.I wanted to spare my spent batteries from the trash can (where they could potentially catch fire or explode) and keep them out of the landfill (where they could leach harmful chemicals into local ecosystems), but I wasn’t sure how to recycle them. I was also skeptical that recycling would actually do anything, having spent decades dutifully recycling plastic with seemingly little impact (from 1980 to 2018, just 7% of all plastic…

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