The Great Battery Rip-off

Are you buying those large discounted Energizer and Duracell battery packs at Home Depot and grocery stores? You can save yourself a ton of money by using rechargeable batteries and contribute less to landfills.

For those of us with Nintendo Wii remotes, toys and other electronic devices, recyclables make sense financially. You can find them at RadioShack (all sizes) and Home Depot (some sizes) and I recommend you buy Nickel-Metal Hydride (NiMH). You will need a recharging unit (see photo). If you are used to recharging a cell phone or digital camera battery, it’s much the same. Don’t use them for smoke detectors; they go dead after a few months even when they’re not being used.

Now you may not care about the money. Traditional single-use batteries are supposed to last up to 5 years. But they never do! You are almost sure to find the last batteries have already discharged by the time you need them. This is a rip-off for consumers and, worse, huge numbers go into landfills.

Recycling batteries is a complicated business, of course. While regular batteries are thrown in the trash elsewhere in the U.S., not in the City of LA. Rechargeable batteries DO have to be recycled, per a 2005 California law, because they contain toxic metals such as mercury, lead, cadmium, and nickel. The law requires retailers to accept all rechargeable batteries from consumers for recycling but the City of LA decided consumers get confused about the difference between regular and rechargeable and so they require ALL batteries be recycled. Drop them off at Home Depot and other locations.

Unfortunately most batteries are disposed of in hazardous waste landfills, since it is not cost-effective to strip them down. But I see this as another reason to use rechargeables - they last longer and fewer batteries end up in landfills.