[avar]

> no one is going to be breeding batteries like cobras, regardless of the reward.

Yes they are. You can buy Li-ion batteries of the mAh size commonly used in phones for $1-2 in bulk on AliExpress. Any price incentive to return them is going to either be too low for most people to bother, or so high that you'd have an incentive to produce batteries just to throw them away.

> If a token reward motivated people to scrounge disposed-of electronics pulling out lithium-ion batteries for return [..., it works for bottle deposit programmes!]

This works for bottles because e.g. on a Friday night in a major city trashcans downtown are going to be full of drink bottles. This works because there's a lot of them, they're big and obvious, and people consume them in large quantities.

A battery in a phone that you keep for months or years isn't worth digging through general trash for.

I recycle my own batteries because it's easy to do while I'm at it for some feel-good about reducing pollution. I'm not against recycling. I'm just saying that I don't see how a price incentive for this makes sense.

[notatoad]

>you'd have an incentive to produce batteries just to throw them away.

the point of a deposit is that it's charged on the production, and only refunded on the return. you're not just paying people to return batteries. If there was a $5 deposit on a phone-sized lithium-ion battery, it would no longer be possible to buy those batteries for $1-2 because the deposit would have to be charged on import.

[avar]

Right, so all of the incentives of evading cigarette taxation, except this time around there's a machine that'll accept the "cigarettes" you have for sale, and your "customer" won't be able to tell the difference between a cigarette and a tube of Styrofoam.

This sort of deposit scheme makes sense and works for e.g. glass beer bottles because in practice they're high-volume items (a consumer might return a 24 bottle crate/week), and the bottles/crates are actually still useful items in themselves and can be immediately returned to consumer circulation after some washing and gluing a new label on them.

The price/volume/weight of glass bottles & beer crates also makes any sort of return fraud impractical.

As opposed to Li-ion batteries which are going to be broken when they're returned. How is a vending machine that gives me money for a deposited phone battery going to know the difference between a battery and a piece of wood I covered in some duct-tape and wires?

And all for what? Reducing Li-ion pollution? It isn't some massive problem in developed countries, and people mostly do sort their batteries in recycling if given the chance.

So again, I'm not arguing that the recycling is a bad idea, but that this idea of giving it a price incentive in this case is a terrible idea.

[mattkrause]

I paid a $10 “core charge” when I bought a new car battery, which was refunded when I brought the old one back so that it could be recycled. I don’t see why this would be impractical for phone batteries too.

[notatoad]

how did this turn into a discussion on the merits of vending machines? you can recycle things without vending machines.

[avar]

Because that's how bottle return works in developed countries, which is a proxy for it being trivial to detect if a returned bottle is good.

Whereas the suggestions in this thread that I've been replying to are going to involve some combination of a massive ramp-up in customs inspections, as well as local recycling facilities where returned Li-ion batteries would need to be manually inspected. It just doesn't seem worth it.

[mikepurvis]

I should have clarified: for the lithium battery case, I'm not talking about people going through residential trash, but rather than the incentive would make it worthwhile for small operations to sort through e-waste bins from retailers and so-on.