Welcome to Boardsort™ - Learn - Sell - Profit -

Lithium is a valuable and expensive metal.

A pouch battery like an iPhone is worth about $4 in lithium. Those big 20 amp and 30 amp portable bricks are worth nearly what you paid new to a specialist buyer/refiner.

Boardsort has reasons for no longer wanting them. And most yards are generally reluctant to keep them around.
Hell, tug the arm of any top level manager at a cell phone store and they’ll tell you they don’t like having spares around in bulk.
When all goes well, great.
Any minor issue, problems. Police and fire department problems.
And scrap yards have nightmare level issues on record. Just look up the videos on YouTube. Or head off the normal track and look up the scrap yard that had the guy torched and 3 people died.

Look, truth, in your phone there’s not much to worry about. Those portable bricks (the quality ones) are reinforced with shock absorbing plastics and titanium or hardened steel shells.

but when you have 500 of them and one slips off and gets run over by a 20 ton fork lift… the battery bursts into jet fire, the tires catch, the propane tank explodes, and you have 10 tons of shrapnel and flaming goo.
Which is why so many recyclers want nothing to do with them.
And that’s aside from the fact that something like 99% of people don’t tape the contacts. Short fires are a common menace.

_________________
42 6F 61 72 64 73 6F 72 74 2E 63 6F 6D

Occasionally I cut off the connectors from laptop and cell phone batteries. If they have separate wires you can safely cut it off, but if they have thin ribbon wires I would not attempt.

Some laptops (such as mid 2010s MacBooks) have a BMS board attached that's a small high peripheral board

Everything else goes into the Call2Recycle battery bin at Home Depot or wherever. I can't find any scrapyard nearby that buys batteries, I understand that they are probably a fire hazard to store especially that not everyone is responsible enough to tape the terminals.

The last yard near Austin that I knew accepted them has apparently stopped.

So now I got to figure out how to get rid of them. You'd think with a big electric vehicle company nearby there would be demand for the material... *sigh*

Update, bit of miscommunication with the yard while I was asking about lithium iron batteries. They still take laptop and cellphone batteries :D

_________________
Here to learn more so I can recycle more
My grades are my own opinion and not an official grade from Boardsort

wait it is? And here I been cutting open the batteries to toss the Lithium sheets in to water to watch them go boom, aka home made fireworks. I'll need to find a place to take them because I have a few buckets of lithium batteries.

Extremely volatile and rather expensive.

Assuming you have a buyer close enough to drive to: yes.
But the weight and packing requirements tend to eat any profit if you have to ship them yourself.

You have two common types.
Lithium hydroxide Gel and wet packs. Like car batteries and cellphone and laptop batteries.
Bare cell phone packs tend to go for around $7-10 per pound right now.
Replaceable batteries in cases will fetch up to $3

These get turned into new batteries.


Or Lithium carbonate
Think aa/aaa and N, button cells.


Those the most common.

_________________
42 6F 61 72 64 73 6F 72 74 2E 63 6F 6D

Man I wish I had a place close by to take them to. I get so many cell phones, laptop, lawn stuff lithium batteries, lithium bats in tools and so on. But it is fun to toss them in a bucket of water watch the pretty lights and then see the big boom lol.