From toxic waste to growing food? Why we should recycle batteries.

No other item inspired the creation of The Happy Beetle more than dead household batteries. In proposing the concept to friends and neighbors, it seemed everyone had a zip loc bag of dead batteries, just waiting to figure out what to do with them. Batteries represented the perfect combination: intuitively we know they shouldn’t be discarded, recycling options were limited, and they are small enough to innocuously accumulate in a back closet or junk drawer.

Batteries are one of the most popular items collected by The Happy Beetle!

We’ve likely seen a AA battery well past the end of its life. Even within the dry, and secure protection of an old child’s toy or walkie-talkie, it begins to swell, leak, and “rot”. Almost as if it were an organic item like an orange that begins decomposing from the inside out, the battery’s harmful inner contents begin to spew to the outside. It’s easy to imagine the rapid and guaranteed leakage of a battery in a harsh landfill environment with large temperature swings, moisture, and heavy impact. These freshly exposed materials can be picked up by the wind, washed down in rainstorms, and ultimately contaminate our drinking water sources.

These same toxic heavy metals used to construct a battery are also rare and typically require dangerous and environmentally disastrous mining practices. Just as recycled paper reduces the need to fell additional trees, recycling batteries reduces the need for destructive mining practices. In fact, some studies show that the greatest concentration of rare earth metals is now in our landfills.

But what actually happens to the batteries that we collect? We work with the nation’s leading battery processor, Cirba Solutions, to ensure that recycling is safe, efficient, and protects the environment. In fact, the materials within a household battery become new steel products, brick colorants, and even fertilizer for corn and soybean farmers!

The benefits to our environment and our health our clear, and we’re proud to offer our customers a convenient, sustainable, and effective model for collecting household batteries for recycling. Let’s work together to shift household batteries’ end-of-life from drinking water contaminant to agriculture fertilizer and raw materials to prevent destructive mining. How cool is that?!