I have two 9-volt square batteries which have somehow been smashed (I suspect a chair rolled over them, or they were bumped around in a bag). The top of the metal casing has sheered off both batteries. Here is a pic.
These were new (one is still in the packet) so are presumably fully charged, but I don’t know how old they are; if I’m honest, they’ve been sitting around for quite a while on my “maybe I should do something about this” list.
What I’m starting to worry about is the fire risk. An obvious follow-on question is how I get rid of them - lots of places around here have battery recycling schemes, but I’m not sure how they’d feel about me tossing these in a big plastic bucket with all the other (spent) batteries people have recycled.
Alkaline batteries can usually go into the trash. If you have a local place that takes batteries (presumably UK if Sainsbury’s) then look them up. For example, in the US Home Depot will take recyclable batteries.
Can’t see the pic (sites like Imgur are far from universal in viewability).
Use decent tape, wrap them completely, dispose as your wont. (Electrical, duct, good masking tape, no “Scotch” tape.)
Bare batteries, esp. ones broken open, can short when they are thrown in with other trash like metal. 9 volts can really get things going. Videos are available on YouTube showing you how to start a fire using one.
Looking at the pictures, he doesn’t actually have 2 9 volt batteries anymore. He has 12 LR61 batteries, at least one of which is broken open. Still reasonable advice. The LR61 cells are almost identical to AAAA batteries (very slightly shorter). You could probably actually use them if you had anything that took AAAA batteries. If you wanted to recycle them, you could throw away the 9V shell and take the little batteries to the recycling place.
In the US, Home Depot and Best Buy and others will only take rechargeable batteries.
There is virtually no place in the US to recycle ordinary household alkaline batteries. And the stupid law in California requiring all batteries to be recycled hasn’t changed that. There is a single plant in Michigan that recycles non-rechargeable alkaline batteries and they charge a fee to do so.
It doesn’t look like you have any actual broken batteries. You have a battery pack that has become separated into it’s individual components. The individual cells are differ from regular aaa’s only in their size. You could snip the metal strips connecting them together if you really want, but it’s not that big of a deal. If one of the individual cells is actually broken up (to where you can see the roll of stuff inside) that technically should go to hazardous waste disposal.
There’s probably a phone number or website for customer service on the packaging and they should be able to give you a better answer.
aaaa, not aaa. Six aaa batteries wouldn’t fit in a 9V shell. And actually, they are slightly different in size, although they would probably work - see #5. AAAA batteries aren’t sold very many places, since only a few things take them.
Forgot to add, it’s those swollen lithium batteries that make me uneasy so I keep them in a fireproof box until they can be disposed of. I don’t think 9V batteries are similarly known to catastrophically explode, especially if you don’t short them out.
WalMart and Amazon to name two, but they are rarely used. The one object I’ve had in my life needing them was a wall clock. Why, I don’t konw because there was plenty of room for even an AA-sized cell. I got rid of it because it went through a battery in a couple months and I got tired of replacing it.
BTW, some 9V batteries contain rectangular cells rather than the cyclindrical (close to AAAA) ones:
The middle one is an alkaline battery like the one with the LR61 cells. Wiki also provides a picture comparing the LR61 from a 9V battery to an actual AAAA:
Officially it’s 3.5 mm shorter. The battery holders on most AAAA devices will have long enough spring clips to accomodate that.
