About

Last verified 2026-09-30

This site answers one question properly: what to do with a lithium battery you no longer want. Where it can go, what each collection point will and won’t take, how to handle one that’s swollen or damaged, and which scheme covers which kind of battery.

It’s free, there’s nothing to sign up for, and the “where can I take this near me” step goes straight to the operators’ own live maps rather than to a copy of their data that would quietly go out of date.

Who publishes it

lithium.com.au is published by Lithium Systems, a registered business name of a sole trader in New South Wales, ABN 78 235 743 812. You can check that on the ABN Lookup register.

It’s one person. Not a content team, not an agency, and not a network of sites. Every page here is researched and drafted with support from AI tools, working from the sources listed at the foot of it, then read end to end and checked against those same sources by that person before it goes live. Nothing is churned out in bulk and published unread. Exactly where the tools are used, and where they aren’t, is on how this content is maintained. Mail to [email protected] reaches the same person.

What this site isn’t

We’re not battery engineers. Not firefighters, chemists or waste industry professionals either. The background here is software development, and pretending otherwise would be the quickest way to make this site worth less than the sources it draws on.

So the site is built the other way round:

• None of the safety guidance is ours. It’s quoted from and credited to the bodies whose job it is: the NSW EPA, B-cycle, the ACCC, NSW Government electrical safety. Where they’re specific, we keep their wording rather than smoothing it into something friendlier. On a safety instruction, a nicer paraphrase is a worse instruction.
• Every regulatory claim, date and figure can be traced. If a page says a scheme stops at 5 kg, or that a retailer won’t take lithium, the source that says so is linked at the bottom of that page, and the date it was last checked is at the top.
• Where we only know the answer for one state, the page says so. Battery disposal above 5 kg is run state by state. What’s published here is checked for New South Wales, and the other states will get proper treatment rather than a guess.
• Where we don’t know, we say so. That happens more often than a confident site would admit.

The expertise this site claims is narrow: finding the primary sources, reading them carefully, re-checking them on a schedule, and writing down plainly what they say. Nothing beyond that.

We’re also not affiliated with B-cycle, the NSW EPA, any council, or any retailer named on this site. Nobody named here has any say in what’s written about them.

Why it needs to exist

The information is out there, but it’s scattered across the people who each own one piece of it: the scheme operator, the retailer, the council, the state agency. None of them is in the business of putting the whole answer together for someone standing in the garage holding a dead battery.

And it goes out of date quietly. Officeworks is the example we keep coming back to. Its own recycling page says plainly that it “no longer accepts batteries in-store” and points people to B-cycle instead. Information like that changes, and advice that isn’t re-checked doesn’t.

B-cycle doesn’t take everything. B-cycle, Australia’s nationwide, government-backed battery stewardship scheme, accepts different battery types with some limitations on weight. Working out which battery goes where is most of what this site does.

And guessing wrong isn’t just inconvenient. The NSW EPA warns that batteries in kerbside bins may catch fire in garbage trucks and waste facilities. That’s why we’d rather this site be narrow, dated and checked than broad and confident.

How it’s paid for

There’s no advertising, sponsored content or affiliate link on this site today. It’s a commercial business and that may change. If it does, anything commercial will be labelled near the top of the page that carries it, never tucked away in the footer. What isn’t for sale is the guidance itself. Where a battery should go is decided on the sources, and no advertiser gets a say. The terms of use spell that out.

Tell us when we’re wrong

We mean it. A reader who’s just been turned away from a drop-off point knows something this site doesn’t. Email [email protected] with the page and, if you have it, the source showing the right answer. A person will read it, and it feeds the same re-checking that every page on the site goes through.