Discarding dead batteries

Costco hearing dept told me I could drop the dead batteries off there rather than throwing in the trash.

Maybe at a Radio Shack…if there are still any around.

Echo Doc Jake. Since there is virtually no mercury in the hearing aid batteries, just drop them in the trash.

There’s no mercury in today’s batteries, but there is zinc, which apparently is a problem according to Google. I know we all look at our batteries about once a week, see that they’re about the size of a couple of M&Ms, so we toss them. But add up all the millions of hearing aid wearers and perhaps this is something we should consider.

I would take them back to my HIS, but somehow I suspect he would say “thank you,” then dump them in the trash himself!

Maybe you could store them up in a little box, and drop them off at Home Depot or Lowe’s when you’re out and about.

What do you do with all of your other batteries? D, C, AA, AAA, etc?

Quite frankly, ALL of my batteries go in the trash. But I do feel a little twinge of guilt each time I do that.rolleyes:

Zinc is a very common element in nature, and it is widely used in commerce. It is considered an essential mineral for good health. Every car made today, other than aluminum and fiberglass cars, has many pounds of zinc in galvanized sheet metal. Galvanized metal is in lots of other places as well. Cheap die-cast shapes, sometimes called pot metal, are mostly zinc. A lot of this stuff ends up in landfills. Obviously one should not OD on zinc or anything else, but the amount in zinc in batteries is negligible compared to the other sources

In other words, when it come to the tiny amount of zinc in all the hearing aid batteries in the world, fuggedaboutit.

@hlaasdan4 said:

What can I do with dead batteries? Where to discard them, etc?

Thanks!

Most audiologists will take them back and send them out to be re-cycled. Just pack them up and take them
to your Audi.

@BlueCrab said:

There’s no mercury in today’s batteries,

This is not true.
At least in the EU you can find a trashcan pictogram with a big X over it on the package.
Below this you can see usually see “Pb” (lead) and on some brands “Hg” (mercury), too.

Here in Germany people just return the batteries to the seller for proper disposal.
Back in the pre-zinc-air ages, a friend of me always pressed his old batteries empty with tongs into his mercury collect jar.
He said that the battery sellers usually didn’t look very happy when they saw the open batteries with the occasional mercury droplets…

Best buy takes back batteries so my advice is to start the car drive to the nearest BB or aud put tons of needless greenhouse gas in the air to recycle the most minimal amounts that are in a HA battery of which may end in the trash anyway. Seem like as good an ideas as taking a private jet to pick up a environmental award.

@JustEd said:

Best buy takes back batteries

But if you are going there anyway, might as well drop them off.