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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

Consumable parts are and have never been reused. Just sounds like you had a faulty part, rather than a reused one.

> Consumable parts are and have never been reused

Are phone parts "consumable"? I thought "consumable" meant refers to things that get "used up" like milk, ink, pens, etc., not storage media or LCD screens or the like...

Batteries can be consumable after a fashion, as they lose capacity with each charge cycle. The effect can be reduced via certain techniques (depending on the battery chemistry involved), but so far never completely eliminated. Just consider it entropy in action, really.

Is there any way to reclaim the resources in a "used up" battery to reintroduce them to the production chain?

You absolutely can, but it's currently not cost-effective. On the other hand it looks like it's cheap enough that making it mandatory or putting a recycling deposit on batteries would be viable.

Are battery recycling programs near you not feasible? Our local Home Depot and Best Buy stores will take back rechargeable batteries for recycling for free.

Do they recycle all of a lithium ion battery?

Very little of the physical (the lithium). However all of the precious materials (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling#Lithium_ion_...).

It's not worth it to extract the lithium, monetarily speaking.

> Consumable parts are and have never been reused

Can you substantiate that? It's clearly at odds with my experience, neither of my two replacement units had a battery life that even came close to unboxed unit.

I just don't buy that every serviced device gets a new battery.

(I am in Europe by the way)

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