Zinc Carbon battery
First, let’s take a look at one of the most common types of battery that you can find around you. This is a Zinc-Carbon battery:
It is a dry cell, primary battery. It delivers around 1.5 volts of direct current, which use the reaction between zinc and manganese dioxide.
It is also the first commercial dry cell battery that you can find at small portable devices that drain less energy throughout time, such as a clock, remote control, flashlight, and radio. It’s a commonly use because it’s a low-cost cell.
This is how it usually looks like, a cylindrical shape with a positive and a negative terminal at the top and bottom of the cell. Which is the “AA battery” that we commonly see all around the world.
This is how the chemistry work for Zinc Carbon work:
Although Zinc Carbon battery is commonly used and cheap to manufacture, it raises an environmental concern as thousands of tons of zinc-carbon batteries are thrown away every year all around the world, and they are usually not recycled.
Due to the fact that it is also a primary cell, which means that it cannot be rechargeable, more waste will be produced if people don’t recycle it properly. That is why in the EU, many places that sell batteries require by law to accept old batteries for recycling.