Wondering what to do about your old car batteries? What about your old phone batteries, or even your AA's??

Recycling your old batteries is an important aspect of reducing the heavy metals and acids that enter our landfills. These metals, which can include Mercury, eventually enter the ecosystem through the ground water tables. Once these elements have leached into the environment, they can enter the food stream either through crops or fish.

Diverting the waste from landfill is important - so what are the options?

An easy first step toward battery recycling that should answer most of your questions is Recycling Near You, a Planet Ark backed website. This fantastic website allows you to search by either your council or by what product you wish to recycle. While it may not answer every question you may have, it should certainly assist you on most other products, battery or not, expecially for mobile phone batteries, car batteries and recyclable batteries.

In addition, councils and communities generally have their own recycling initiatives, contacts, referrals or outlets that may lead you in the right direction. Unfortunately this level of detail would be simply too numerous and overwhelming to name here. While Recycling Near You will allow you get a idea what your local council does offer, it may be prudent to visit your councils website or contact them directly for more localised information. In addition, stores that sell batteries (like Battery World and mobile phone shops) may also have recycling facilities.

Mobile Phones and Batteries:

www.mobilemuster.com are the self proclaimed "Official Recycling Program Of The Mobile Phone Industry." The site has a facility where you can enter your postcode and locate your nearest mobile phone recycler.  Note: Your computer must have Pop Up's enabled to use this service. They also offer a free postage service. Simply click the link and print the document.

Zoos Victoria also offer a free postal service for the recycling of mobile phones, focussing on the plight of Gorillas in Africa. You can check out their Campaign page here.

In addition, major phone network shop fronts like Telstra, Virgin, Vodafone and Optus, retail outlets Dick Smith and Harvey Norman and Banks (ANZ) have recycling bins or collection points positioned within the store.

Clean Up Australia also offers mobile phone collection and recycle programs. Call 1800 282 329 or visit www.cleanup.com.au/au/ and organise for a postage-paid satchel to be mailed to you.

The importance of recycling your old mobile is hard to grasp when you just have the one or two gathering dust at the back of your drawer at home, but each phone contains small quantities of valuable and rare metals. Things like gold, silver, platinum, paladium and nikel make up tiny components of the inner workings of your phone. Assuming everyone upgrades every year or two, within only a few years we have masses of phones cluttering up drawers all over the country. All those phones added together, that's a lot of gold, silver and platinum!

The mining of these valuable metals can often cause problems - in West Africa the jungle gorilla has found it's habitat shrinking after the mining of Coltan has destroyed the forests it lived in. By recycling those mobile phones, and by pledging to hang on to your new one for a year or even 6 months longer than before, you're paving the road to sustainable production of mobiles.

Check out www.thesecretlifeofthings.com for more information (and kookie animations) regarding the life cycle of everday items. They also have learning resources and links to other 'green' sites.

Car Batteries:

Unfortunately, Australia is lagging behind other countries when it comes to recycling car batteries. Where as a lot of European countries have the facilities to recycle the cadium in Nickel Cadium rechargeable batteries ((NiCads) are fully recyclable), this service is not yet available down under. As a result, currently the only safe option is to contact your local waste management centre and arrange a drop off. Contact your local council to centre locations. Alternatively, contact your local mechanic, car battery retailer or service station or scrap metal dealers and ask if they will take the battery for you.

Having said all that, Orbitas claims to have become "an industry leader in providing innovative resource recovery solutions and management programs that meet the needs of business and the environment. Orbitas are stakeholders in various ‘state-of-the-art' recovery facilities and operations" and "have an Australia-wide dedicated Agency and Service network that provides solutions for recycling and reprocessing of used Lead Acid Batteries (ULAB), used Non Lead Acid Batteries (UNLAB)."

Perhaps their greatest benefit to the everday consumer is that they offer a pick up service, Addintionally their website has come a long way since aToMik Green first discovered it, and it now has some great information about all things battery related.

Some major car clubs (RACV, NRMA etc) occasionally hold battery collection days, however they seem to be rather spasmodicly held and sparsely advertised. For more information, it may take a call to the club to see if there are any plans in the pipeworks.

Household Batteries:

The most common household batteries (AA, AAA, C, D and 9v) batteries contain Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH), which doesn't contain any toxic materials and can therefore be disposed with your household waste. Of course, using rechargeable batteries will mean fewer batteries going to landfill. 6v batteries, while containing Alkiline and Carbon Zinc, can also be disposed of with your household waste. Unfortunately these batteries do not come in a rechargeable version yet.

For Victorians, Sustainability Victoria have organised a program called Batteryback. The trial ran for six months, from 19th October 2009 to 30th April 2010 and has been extended to at least June 2011. It began as a trail program designed to gain some insight into the battery waste stream and community response. Collection points can be found on the website. The Batteryback website also has more details about the scheme and all are encouraged to make full use of it as a favourable response may initiate some more permanent, and perhaps national, services.

Perhaps the closest initiative to a national recycling scheme is offered by CleanAway and is called the Transpacific Battery Recycling Programme. There is a fee involved to utilise this program, but at the time of writing no indication of costs could be found. When notified, we will update this section.

Otherwise household bettery recycling is somewhat lacking in Australia. Members of the 'battery industry' recently got together in an effort to investigate if a national battery collection and recycling program was possible. The results are not yet known.

If you are aware of any other household battery recycling program or even how the meeting of battery industry people went, please email us This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and we will update this section.