Button cell batteries are the small, flat, round batteries found in watches, hearing aids, car key fobs, calculators, and medical devices. Although they are tiny, these batteries contain valuable materials that can be recovered and can harm the environment if not handled or disposed of correctly. The main challenge in recycling button cells is their small size and the difficulty of sorting them.
Every year, TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield pitch contest draws thousands of applicants. We whittle those applications down to the top 200 contenders, and of them, the top 20 compete on the big stage to become the winner, taking home the Startup Battlefield Cup and a cash prize of $100,000. But the remaining 180 startups all blew us away as well in their respective categories and compete in their own pitch competition.
Nevada-based Redwood employees around 1,200 employees, so the cuts affect a few dozen workers. The company, founded in 2017 by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel, initially focused on recycling scrap from battery cell production, consumer electronics, and used EV batteries. The company extracts materials like cobalt, nickel, and lithium from those discarded goods and then sells them back to its customers, which includes Panasonic. Redwood has since added cathode production.
Of the 70 people whose blood was tested as part of the investigation, 70% had amounts of lead in their bloodstream that were described as "harmful," including all of the people who worked in recycling facilities. The Times also compared their findings to the lead pollution caused by a now-shuttered auto battery recycling plant in Vernon, California. The investigation noted that soil at a school in Ogijo had around 20 times as much lead as a preschool near the plant in Vernon.
The device itself needs two alkaline AAA batteries to work -- and a set are provided to get you going. Using the tester is easy. The hardest part if figuring out which slot fits which battery, because if you get it wrong, it'll give you an inaccurate measure of how much power remains. Once you've figured out where your battery goes, push the positive end into the slot and use the probe to touch the other end
