All? It's not like you can throw them in the trash, so where else would I bring them except to the battery recycling collection point?

You intended for them to be recycled, but just because you dropped it at a recycling depot or disposal doesn't mean they got recycled.

There are countless stories and studies showing that only a fraction of recyclable materials actually make it through recycling - it's kind of an E for Effort state for anything but glass and metal :(

In Montreal, the Eco Centre accepts batteries and then “sends them to a recycler”

It’s almost impossible to know what that actually means. if you look up a local company like li-cycle all they do is grind up the batteries into a powder, which is then sold to off takers and licycles case these off takers, actually only extract, nickel and cobalt from the batteries. This is the tip of the iceberg. There’s no way to know what actually happens to your battery after it is given to the city. Notably, plastic recycling is fake, and my city just makes a giant pile of plastic separate from the giant pile of garbage.

> Notably, plastic recycling is fake, and my city just makes a giant pile of plastic separate from the giant pile of garbage.

For some measures of "fake". The German PET bottle deposit scheme works relatively well, as the material collected is pure PET with very little contamination.

For pretty much every other type of plastic, "recycling" usually means thermal use, aka burning it for district heating.