Not Everything Should Be Rechargeable
9 min read
Lithium-ion batteries are miraculous. They’re strong enough to run a vehicle, and they can be recharged at any outlet. Their commercial debut, in 1991, and popularization over the next two decades, has helped create a golden age of high-end consumer tech: We now have plenty of e-bikes and electric cars, and also phones, smartwatches, computer mice, and earbuds that can last for a day or more on a single charge. The spread of these batteries has produced a global race for mineral dominance. Lithium power is the future.
But that future may not be desirable, at least not in every circumstance and application. Lithium-ion batteries are being used in lots of modest gadgets in which they don’t belong, such as flashlights and TV remotes. There is a class of gadgets that you should never have to charge—ones that tend to be needed right away, at specific moments. A flashlight, for example, serves its most essential purpose during a blackout, when juicing up its battery would be impossible. Yet some flashlights are now designed with batteries that cannot simply be swapped out—as if having lithium-ion cells somehow made them better instead of worse.
This dejecting trend now afflicts a host of middle-tier and low-end home electronics: not just flashlights and remotes, but also toothbrushes, fabric-pilling removers, can openers, nose-hair trimmers, and sex toys. My handheld milk frother is rechargeable. Same goes for my kitchen scale. Ensuring that either of these gadgets worked on demand used to be straightforward: One simply filled a drawer with old-fashioned, disposable batteries—AAs, AAAs, and sometimes Cs. Now that drawer is full of cables too: a cold spaghetti of USB connectors that must be sorted and attached to fit the tool and task at hand.
You’ve been duped into thinking that a rechargeable device always offers real convenience. Market forces have aligned with this widespread, false belief, and now the golden age of high-end consumer tech is having knock-on, ill effects. The newest batteries can be frustrating to use, and they aren’t fully safe to throw away. Lithium power is miraculous—but it’s gone too far.
Recently, I had to go into my attic to investigate a roof leak. It’s dark up there, so I pulled out a nifty headlamp that I’d purchased on a lark a while back, on the premise that sometimes you need a headlamp. That time had come! But then I realized that my headlamp needed to be charged, which meant digging up the right cable and AC adapter, and waiting hours until its battery was full. All that waiting turned out to be in vain, because the recharged light went out minutes into my task, just when I had reached the deepest darkness of my attic. Somehow, I got out again.
The headlamp was a bust. At the very least, its battery was busted, and because I could not replace the cell or try to fix it, I had to throw the whole thing out. But even as I pondered how to do this most responsibly—disposing of a lithium-ion battery comes with its own set of risks and inconveniences—I began to wonder how I, and we, had ever come to be in this predicament. Why was this device rechargeable at all?
The answer starts with electric vehicles, and the research and manufacturing infrastructure that makes them possible. Matthew T. McDowell, a co-director of the Georgia Tech Advanced Battery Center, told me that steady improvements in lithium-ion-battery materials and performance, combined with rapid growth in production capacity and falling costs, have made them viable for use in more devices. About 50 gigawatt-hours’ worth of lithium-ion-energy capacity was sold in 2014; by 2022, that figure had swelled to more than 700. Prices fell from about $700 per kWh in 2014 to $140 last year. Power tools offer one example of how those advances have been playing out. A decade ago, rechargeable power drills and even small chainsaws worked well enough. Now almost any tool, including lawn mowers and leaf blowers, can be used effectively via lithium-ion power.The same benefits of scale and innovation apply to smaller gadgets too, such as kitchen scales and headlamps.
Lithium-ion batteries have some clear benefits over the disposable batteries they’re replacing. When designing for the latter, “you’re limited by their cylindrical-form factor,” Case Engelen, the CEO of the electronic-products-manufacturing consultancy Titoma, told me. Manufacturers that switch to rechargeables no longer have to shape their devices around those tubular compartments with little springs. Lithium-ion batteries, when they’re made properly, also tend to last longer than the older kind, and they’re smaller, lighter, and more powerful. If my lithium-ion-powered headlamp worked, it could produce a more intense beam than a lamp running on AAAs, while also being sleek enough to wear comfortably around my skull.
Still, I would have rather just had an AAA-powered flashlight with me in the attic, even with a weaker beam, because it would have worked at the moment when I needed it (or as soon as I’d put in fresh batteries). The fact that my headlamp had been made rechargeable at greater cost of manufacture—products with lithium-ion batteries are more expensive to produce than those with compartments for disposables—suggests that some factor other than mere utility is at play. Rechargeable gizmos certainly seem to be more marketable than other options. Some devices that would not previously have taken batteries at all, including pepper grinders and lighters, are now getting fitted out with lithium-ion cells.
The lithium-ion battery seems to be following the path of the iPhone’s touch screen: Both are engineering coups that became victims of their own success. After the touch screen revolutionized the smartphone, it started showing up in places where it had no real reason to exist—on car dashboards, for example, and gas pumps, ovens, and retail cash registers. That spread had less to do with the functionality of multi-touch capacitive displays than their cultural meaning: Touch screens were the latest, coolest thing in tech. It took some 15 years for a user backlash to take hold, and for buttons, knobs, and switches to have their own revival as a special added feature.
USB-rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are following the same trajectory, making some high-end gadgets even better while also showing up in lots of products that they don’t improve. Consumers have come to expect them and demand them, Engelen told me: “It’s perceived as backwards to have to put in cell batteries, to buy new ones, to throw the old ones away.” If my headlamp had been a bit more dowdy and old-fashioned—say, if it were fitted out with Energizer batteries—that would have made my life a little better. But in 2024, dowdy gadgets can be hard to find.
Energizer Holdings, a battery-and-lighting company that traces its history to the 1890s, happens to be based in my home city of St. Louis, Missouri. A neighborhood friend works there as a senior executive. Still, my relationship with the company and its products has lately dwindled down to almost nothing. When I was growing up, Energizer was, of course, a household name: The pink, plush bunny in its TV spots used to bang a bass drum as it raced across the screen, illustrating the idea that Energizer batteries keep going and going and going. These advertisements still exist, of course. According to Jeff Roth, the company’s global category leader for batteries and lights, the bunny has always been a symbol of “the resilience, perseverance and power of our products.”
The market for disposable batteries has certainly persevered. Each year, Energizer sells some 20 billion “convenient little cylinders of energy,” as Roth described them. And although cheaper alternatives are now available—the AmazonBasics line has reportedly outsold Energizer in recent years—the most familiar battery makers work tirelessly to retain consumers’ trust. When you slide a set of Duracells or Energizers into your flashlight, you pretty much know that it will work.
But the makers of lithium-ion batteries inspire no such faith, and certainly no such loyalty. The same inconspicuousness that makes their products so conducive to industrial design—the lighter weight and lack of “cylindrical-form factor”—also transforms them into mere component parts. I’ve never seen the battery inside my broken headlamp, and I never will. I don’t know where it might have come from, or whether its manufacturer is reliable in any way. I could not have chosen to install a better one that I purchased for a higher price. There is no advertising for this product. There is no Energizer Bunny for lithium.
As a result, the market for rechargeable devices is suffused with junky options, and the differences in quality can be opaque. When Apple makes a phone, a laptop, or a TV remote, it doesn’t tend to skimp on the cost of each component. Its batteries are good ones. I may find that having to plug in my Apple mouse is annoying, but at least I don’t need to do it very often. Not so with my headlamp. Even though I recall barely having used it, the battery now seems unable to hold a charge for more than a few minutes. That’s not because of its lithium-ion chemistry, but because the part was probably garbage in the first place. Unless you’re Apple, Engelen told me, “the only way you can compete is by being as cheap as possible.”
Cheap, off-brand devices are among the easiest to find, especially when you’re shopping online. When I searched for headlamps on Amazon, the first results were rechargeable options from brands I didn’t recognize. Those were generally cheaper than the headlamps made by Energizer that shipped with Energizer batteries. I can easily imagine buying one without even noting that it’s rechargeable, and then ending up with a thing that barely works.
Whatever their quality, these rechargeable devices pose an ecological challenge that simply isn’t present with disposable cell batteries. “Lithium-ion batteries have not been designed for end of life,” says Jim Puckett, the executive director of Basel Action Network, an NGO that works to curtail toxic-waste export. They’re made from explosive materials, and lithium-ion-battery fires are particularly dangerous. (They aren’t easy to put out with conventional fire extinguishers and can reignite even after they seem to have been quelled.) Ideally, consumers would keep a tub of broken or outdated electronics—like a compost bin for doodads—and then take it over to a municipal hazardous-waste collection site when it gets full. But people have a hard enough time recycling paper or plastic properly. Puckett told me that he’s most worried about the mountain of extremely heavy EV batteries that are being sold to consumers in the absence of any good way to recycle them. But he also sighed at the prospect of recovering the many smaller batteries from Bluetooth earbuds and the like. Lithium-ion-powered vape pens cause him particular dismay. “Tons of those are just being tossed,” he said. “We looked into recycling those, and it’s just a mess. There’s no value in it, and then you’re dealing with all this potential infectious material that’s been in somebody’s mouth.”
Ironically, some consumers seem to think that rechargeable batteries are better for the environment. Engelen said that consumers don’t like disposable batteries in part because they feel that throwing them away is wasteful. (Your spent AAs may indeed end up going to a landfill—but at least they pose no special risks when they get there.) At the same time, the spread of lithium-ion batteries has allowed for more miniaturized gadgets, which may be more likely to end up in the trash can. “Every time something gets smaller, it gets more diffuse, and it can’t be collected again,” Puckett said. Even when rechargeable batteries do make it to proper collection facilities, they may not ever truly get recycled; they could find their way instead to distant landfills, or be reclaimed by offshore e-waste workers, at grave cost to those workers’ health.
Lithium-ion power has made some devices better, including EVs, e-bikes, and all-day electronics. But it’s unfit for many others. Few consumers seem to have noticed this disparity, and fewer still seem to be defending good old-fashioned batteries against the misconception that rechargeables are always better. That portends a future in which every gadget that we own may have to be plugged in from time to time. This is exactly the predicament that batteries were meant to avoid.
