Once the use of toxic mercury in household batteries was eliminated a couple of decades ago, it finally became safe to just toss dead AAs in the trash. But if deep down you actually felt guilty about not being able to recycle them, Energizer's here to help your conscious with its new EcoAdvanced AAs made with four percent recycled battery material.


That doesn't sound like much, but it apparently took Energizer some seven years to figure out how to reuse materials like manganese and zinc from dead batteries, without sacrificing the performance of the final product. And four percent is just the start. Energizer claims the bottleneck actually lies with there being few recycling plants with the technology needed to reclaim the materials from dead alkaline batteries, but by 2025 the amount of recycled material in a new AA could be as high as 40 percent.

A four-pack of Energizer's new EcoAdvanced AA batteries will sell for around five bucks, so they'll be about 25 percent more expensive than comparable high-performance batteries without recycled materials in them. But as their popularity increases, and more and more recycling facilities are able to process alkalines, the costs will certainly come down over time. [Energizer via The Wall Street Journal]