What should be done with a battery at the end of its life?

Take it to a collection point that accepts that chemistry: batteries are covered by specific collection rules almost everywhere, and lithium packs in particular are a fire risk in general waste. Retailers and local authorities publish where they are accepted.

Disposal is the part of the purchase nobody plans and everyone eventually faces, and the rules are not the same for the two chemistries on this shelf.

Why it is regulated separately

Batteries contain materials that do not belong in general waste, and lithium cells can ignite when crushed or punctured — which is what happens in a collection lorry. Collection requirements exist for that reason rather than as a formality.

The routes that exist

Retailer take-back, municipal collection points and dedicated recycling schemes, which vary by country and by chemistry. Lead-acid has a mature route with real material value behind it; lithium processing is newer and expanding.

Before it goes

Terminals covered or taped so nothing can short in transit, and the pack transported as the collection point instructs. A battery with charge left in it is still a source, and a short in the back of a car is the failure mode that these instructions exist to prevent.

The question to ask before buying

Whether the maker or the retailer documents a take-back route, and whether the pack can be serviced rather than replaced. A product with neither is a product whose disposal is entirely your problem, which is worth knowing at the point of purchase rather than years later.

Where this page and the manufacturer’s documentation differ, the documentation is the one to follow. Every capacity, output, input window, current limit, cycle count and temperature threshold on this page comes from the maker’s own published figures, with the unit as printed and the source named. None of it is measured here, and no figure is converted into another convention, because a converted number is a different number. And for any cycle count: the number is set by two qualifiers — the depth of discharge tested and the capacity the pack must still hold at the end. Change either and the same cells produce a different headline. This page reports the qualifiers wherever a maker publishes them, and says they are missing when they are not.