Throwing Away Batteries

So at work I have a stack of dead laptop batteries from a handful of old Dell Lattitude laptops that I rescued before someone threw them away. In retrospect, I should not have rescued them, because they are about 99.99% useless unless I ever have a need to run Doom on an old installation of DOS. (Okay, they aren’t *that* old, but close.)

One day, someone asked me, “Hey why do you have a stack of batteries on your desk?” I said, “Oh, they’re all dead.” This person then asked, “Why don’t you throw them away?” And I of course said, because everyone knows, “You can’t just throw away batteries.” “Why not?” Um. Well, that was a good question actually. I didn’t really have an answer, except a vague sense of hearing somewhere that you shouldn’t throw away batteries.

So I decided to throw caution to the wind and throw the batteries away. The next morning, when I came in, the trash pickup people had carefully removed the batteries and put them back on my desk. Apparently you *can’t* just throw away batteries.

I did some Googling and discovered that, in Virginia, localities can indeed prohibit throwing away rechargable batteries as long as they provide a recycling program (http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?000+cod+10.1-1425.39). I can’t tell if the locality of my workplace has a recycling program or not, but I assume they do.

It seems that these batteries are going to sit on my desk, decaying, emiting toxic, corrosive, and possibly explosive chemicals into the air, for the forseeable future.