In our local council in Kent, we have curb-side recycling of batteries, which is fantastic. The easier we can make recycling, the better. Recycling rates are around 45% for the whole of the UK in 2020, which is fairly poor, Croatia recycle 96% and Poland at 81% are the better two in Europe; with the UK in the bottom quarter.

It is not a well known fact, but batteries have a degree of variability and will discharge at different rates to one another (Section 5.4). Based on this idea, it seems possible that a number of identical batteries within the same item might discharge at different rates.

‘A quarter of recycled batteries had a full charge‘

I decided to collect batteries from curb-side recycling (don’t worry, I’m going to re-recycle them later) and test my theory.

I collected over 100 batteries and with a multimeter put them into three groups. Good, which had an (unloaded) voltage reading of 1.5V or more, Poor, which had a voltage of 1.3-1.49V and Dead, having less than 1.3V. The poor batteries can power low-power devices such as analogue clocks.

I was astounded by what I found.

• Good – 27%
• Poor – 16%
• Dead – 57%

Considering there were batteries that had been discarded for recycling, and thus had been used, I expected that the vast majority would be dead, by my definition they are still useful, so I would hope that others find this empirical research a help, save some money!