So I have 10kw/h of life batteries and the accompanying electronics. One day (not next week, but one day) these are going to need replacing. 

I doubt I can just chuck them in the wheely bin. So where do they go? I'd like to dispose of them responsibly. 

Other problems.

1) how will I know it's time? I presume they gradually last less long (ie don't get through the night anymore). 

2) will there be anything compatible with a 10 ish year old inverter? 

1 hour ago, Bobster said:

So I have 10kw/h of life batteries and the accompanying electronics. One day (not next week, but one day) these are going to need replacing. 

I doubt I can just chuck them in the wheely bin. So where do they go? I'd like to dispose of them responsibly. 

Other problems.

1) how will I know it's time? I presume they gradually last less long (ie don't get through the night anymore). 

2) will there be anything compatible with a 10 ish year old inverter? 

Chances are your reputable inverter manufacturers will continue providing updates and ensuring compatibility, (Victrons Quattros are already 10+ years old).

Check this out 10 year old Quattro with LiFePo4 + Venus GX - Victron Community (victronenergy.com) some fancy features may not be there, possibly some extera external circutry will be required, battery protect etc... I wonder if this unit can comunicate with a BMS. 

I have sent an email to one of my friends in the telecoms industry to ask where they send their lithium batteries, the internet seems to not know the answer and i am quite curious myself.

This might not be the best way to dispose them off, but at least it will be someone else's responsibility and you get something out of them. Try your local scrap yard guys, I disposed off few heavy duty truck batteries a while back and got good money for them 😀

On 2021/09/25 at 7:59 AM, Bobster said:

I'd like to dispose of them responsibly. 

Wondering what effect on environment in the coming years due to batteries that will be smashed and burnt at just about every scrap collectors den to make a few pennies. Acid running down storm water drains and into soil, I’m sure lot of batteries are starting to pile up in garages and all over as they reach end of life. It’s not the easiest thing to get rid of if you want to do it responsibly.

I done a small experiment and took apart a small alarm battery to see if I could make some fishing sinkers, what a dangerous mess. I quickly abandoned that idea. That had me thinking about how environmentally friendly the scrap dealers must be surely they won’t put profit before the environment as we probably have strict laws with inspectors auditing these battery recyclers very often to make sure they don’t have acid spills that might contaminate stormwater or soil. I guess we could also contact a company like hazmat or enviro waste to dispose of them safely and they could even issue a safe disposal certificate, hopefully at a small cost not to expensive so that they encourage us to leave them next to the wheely bin.

 

Many, many years ago I fixed electronic watches for a living. You can imagine the volume of flat batteries that our workshop accumulated.

Because we did SA repairs for a prestige brand we couldn't use just any old battery. We had a list of batteries that met the brand's requirements. Some watches used the now common 3V lithium cells, but quite a few used the little 1.5V cells (think hearing aid batteries). These latter, if we used the approved items, had a small quantity of silver in them.

Serendipitously we learned of a company that would buy our old batteries for recycling. They would pay us according to the quantity of silver they recovered. They would also only take consignments of a certain size. This makes sense - it's way too much trouble to try and extract that small amount of silver from a single battery.

When we had several thousand old batteries we stuck the drum containing them into the back of the company bakkie and took them to the recycling company. They showed us around. Essentially they had a small electric furnace and they would melt the batteries down and extract the molten silver.

You can guess how this ends. We had decided that we'd use our new found wealth to buy cool drinks for the workshop fridge. Well... the amount of silver eventually produced you could put on a finger nail and we got about enough to buy a 6 pack of coke. What was left over was several kilograms of slag which was taken down to the municipal dump.

We tried to get them interested in old circuit boards. We didn't replace whole boards very often, but we occasionally did and there was gold on those. But they said that due to various laws extracting and then selling silver was one thing, extracting and selling gold quite another, so they weren't interested.

This was back in the early 80s when very few were thinking about the amount of junk we generated, but I will never forget that small bead of silver and that much larger lump of slag. A lot of so-called "recycling" is just extracting the tiny valuable component of whatever it is and dumping 99.995% of the original. You don't actually recycle much.

Round about the same time we heard about another company (still there as far as I know) which "recycled" motor oil. They bought it from you for a very small amount. They said the oil itself didn't actually degrade, but the difference between old oil and new oil was the sludge that represented the wearing of the moving parts of your engine. So they would separate out most of the sludge by gravity, get the rest with magnets, do some filtration and add some sort of detergent and, they said, you could use this when servicing your car. It was cheaper than any brand name. A couple of my colleagues bought this product (they serviced their own cars) and said it seemed like a good product but there was no real way of knowing.

The company also recycled 2 stroke oil and resold that for use in motor bikes and lawn mowers. 

So with the oil there was still all that sludge to be disposed of, but I'm inclined to believe the ratio of what could be reused and what made it's way to dumps and groundfill was a bit more skewed to the re-use side.

Sorry to pour more rain on your day.