Where a Dead Battery Goes Next

A AA battery goes flat in a couple of weeks. And yet almost all the metal it was built from is still sitting inside. So it's dead, right? Toss it in with the peelings and the paper. What could it possibly do now?

Here's the thing. This dead-looking object is designed to keep its metal locked in, as long as the casing holds. And the casing holds only until the first serious rust.

At an ordinary landfill, that happens fast. Rust, and the weight of all the rubbish piled around it, break the shell open in months. Not decades, as people like to assume. Inside are zinc and manganese. In older batteries and rechargeable types, there's also nickel and cadmium. Rainwater starts carrying them into the soil and the groundwater.

From here, two roads.

A battery from the general bin goes to a landfill. It stays there for good, rusting along with everything else.

A battery from a separate collection box goes another way. It rides a truck to Chelyabinsk, a city in Russia's Ural region. There stands the only plant of its kind in the whole country.

First, the batteries are sorted by type. Alkaline in one pile, lithium and rechargeable in others. Mixing them up is not an option. Then they're crushed. A magnet pulls out the steel casing. What's left is dissolved in sulphuric acid. The graphite rod doesn't dissolve, so it's filtered out early, before the next step.

That next step is electrolysis. Electric current pulls zinc out of the solution, then manganese, one after the other. The iron goes off to be melted down. The graphite finds a use too.

What comes out isn't waste. It's ordinary raw material. The zinc becomes galvanized coating, or the oxide that goes into cosmetics. The manganese becomes a component for new batteries.

So the same piece of metal can end up on a shop shelf as a battery, a second time. If its casing makes it to Chelyabinsk, and doesn't rust away in the ground first.

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