Recycle Your Old Dry Cells and Hand-Phone Batteries

This post is in response to the subject brought up by Jo Be, the Go Green Ambassador under UNDP. She asked me where to dispose the normal battery, you know, your dry cell for your remote control and other electronic gadgets. Well, to tell you the truth, I have no idea...!!! Hey I am new to this recycling thing. That's why I writing this blog. But not to worry Jo. I will try my best to find out!

Come to think of it, we are always reminded to be eco-friendly and environmental. Having read the Star article by Joseph Loh, I am now more aware of the household waste that we throw out to the rubbish bin. But I am frustrated that the article did not mention on how to dispose of those HHW. So I will try my best to investigate the best way.

According to Alam Flora, we should recycle used batteries because they contain toxic materials such as lithium, cadmium, nickel, lead and hydrate metals that are harmful to the soil and water if not disposed of properly. The chemicals can seep into the soil and eventually into our rivers and oceans. Throwing those harmful chemicals together with your household rubbish, would mean that you just poisoned your own drinking water and polluted your ocean full of food.

For dry-cell like you AAA batteries, we could send it to the recycling centre. I asked one recycling centre at Sri Kembangan, and the person- in-charge mentioned that he would send the batteries to be disposed at Balakong.

There are a few companies in Malaysia that are helping to promote the recycling of phone batteries by placing special transparent bins on their premises. Alam Flora Sdn. Bhd. and Kualiti Alam Sdn. Bhd. would collect these batteries to be sent to Korea, Taiwan and France.

So if you walk around the shopping malls, keep an eye on special transparent bins to dump your old phone and batteries for recycling. I noticed the special bin at the customer service in Jusco I0I just the other day. And I saw some dry-cells in the bin as well.

If you would like to upgrade your Nokia phones, it is best to go to their care center so that they can advise you for a new upgrade and recycle the old one.

If you are using Samsung products like I do, you can request a pre-paid envelope to recycle your Samsung mobile phone and genuine Samsung accessories by providing your details and email it to : samsungrecycle@sta.samsung.com. For more info visit the Samsung website

But before thinking of recycling, you should make sure that the phone is already useless. If it still can be used, you might want to donate it to someone close to you, or a relative. Other alternative is to resell it to the phone dealer. You might want to read Sony Ericsson take-back and recycle program and the research report on recycling.

There is one other alternative that I found on the web. Check out this website and you could recycle your electronics and get paid!

Wow! I have learnt a lot by writing this post. I would like to thank Jo Be for bringing up this subject. I hope this post would be helpful for you guys. If you can help me build this blog with suggestion, opinion and information, feel free to leave a comment. Thanks.