vicious cycle

Consider the battery issue. What happens to all those spent batteries for videocams and the like, including the cheap ones imported from China with higher toxic chemical content?

While reading instructions on ‘battery care and use’ in my mobile phone handbook. I came across this ‘strange’ advice also, apart from many other useful instructions.“The battery should never be placed in the municipal waste. Use the battery disposal facility. Please check local regulations for disposal of batteries.”
Frankly being an electronics engineer, I knew quite a lot about the kind of chemicals like nickel cadmium, lead, mercury used in batteries but had never given a thought to the disposal of used dry as well as wet batteries and the toxic fumes and acidic residues that would ooze out of them where they are decaying.
We use zillions of pencil-cell batteries in all sorts of electronic gadgets, remote controls, calculators, toys, and what not. Imagine the health hazards for garbage collectors and others handling such waste with their bare hands and without masks.
A German wife of my friend told me that in Germany it is an offence to throw a battery in a place other than the battery disposal facility made available by the municipality at appropriate places, from where used batteries are collected, centrally salvaged and their metal and materials, if possible, recycled.
Have our environmentalists, government or the NGOs ever thought of it?

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