All Bottled Up: Safe Battery Disposal

With growing concern about button battery ingestion, I thought I would post this incredibly obvious simple hack for battery disposal.

While this solution doesn't address the problems of button batteries while in use in everything from greeting cards to remote controls to toys, it does keep the old batteries corralled until they can be recycled or disposed of properly (call your local solid waste district or trash service for more information).

We drop our dead batteries in a child-safe vitamin container, and put the containers out of the kids' reach. I relabel the containers solely for my own amusement (Do you do this? Maybe we should start a Pinterest board).

The filled container is deposited at our wonderful local recycling facility (which accepts a broad array of batteries in a co-mingled bin).

Not only does this hack keep our batteries away from our little kids and out of the solid waste stream, it also means that batteries outside the bottles are easily identifiable as fresh.


***Baby Toolkit is a frontrunner in observing the obvious and the ridiculous in parenting. It is written by two geek parents presently enjoying a Fall-like Spring somewhere slightly above the Mason-Dixon line. Although we make no links in this post, we are admittedly Amazon affiliates, so a portion of purchases made through our Amazon links fuel our pipe dreams of owning a bathtub with a water slide (thank you!). Our actual voices (and sordid secrets) can be heard on our board gaming podcast GreatBigTable.com.

Now in Stereo*: We Launch a Boardgames Podcast at GreatBigTable.com

Jim and I have been talking about boardgames for decades, so it's about time we start inviting others to the conversation. While we'll still post written reviews on boardgames here on Baby Toolkit, we just issued our first episode of Great Big Table- our podcast about introducing more people to the boardgaming hobby.  We'll definitely be discussing gaming with our kids and families there, but we're also talking about some community gaming we do with friends, family, coworkers, and at church.

If you have gaming group or are thinking about starting one, please join in this new conversation. If you just want to hear how goony we sound when speaking or some of the conversational torment we like to dish out, well, there's that too.

The podcasts are free and can be individually downloaded  or by subscription. We're not on iTunes yet, but that should happen shortly.

If you have better things to do with your time, we aren't surprised, but sometimes you need to egregiously waste time to really see its value.

*Actually, I think it's mono, so the listener on the left has identical mental loss to the listener seated on the right.

***Baby Toolkit remains the written meanderings of a couple geek parents. Not only are we affiliated with GreatBigTable.com, we ARE GreatBigTable.com.