Question: how do you recycle batteries?

Lizzie Driscoll answered on 8 Feb 2023:

With our Li-ion batteries, we firstly have to make sure there’s no charge left in the battery – so we fully discharge it down to 0% state of charge (just like how phones say 0% when they need recharging). We can then have two approaches – we can manually open up the battery (which is time consuming, but we have nice pure streams of material) or we can shred them (this is quite common to do for electronics). If we shred them, we have a mixture of material – so we then have to think about the materials inside and there properties to make sure we can separate them. Are they magnetic? Are they lightweight? How about their density?

Think about if we had a mixture of paperclips, sugar, plastics and kitchen foil in a tub all mixed together. How would you separate this? We could use water to dissolve the sugar. We could use magnets to remove the paper clips. We could use the static of the balloon to remove the plastic. We could use tweezers to get everything out but this would take a long time. We use this thinking when we’re recycling shredded material.