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For those who care to know, there is a site that you can use to locate a place near you that will accept rechargeable batteries for recycling:

http://www.rbrc.org/

There are some restrictions on size (Radioshack probably won't take the battery used in your 10kVA UPS), so you may want to call ahead and double check if you are unsure (they list the phone number with the name of the place and the address). Also, according to their FAQ, this is only for the US and Canada.

http://www.rbrc.org/consumer/

http://www.ehso.com/ehshome/batteries.php

...please donate it and its charger to a local domestic abuse shelter....

In the US, almost any retail store that recycles rechargeable batteries also accepts old mobile phones. http://www.rbrc.org/call2recycle/ is a good example. While the website does not specifically state so, my prior employer released internally that through this program, handsets that powered up and placed a call were donated to civic causes.

It's the Nickel-Cadmium batteries that are highly toxic.

Um, I think lead-acid batteries are also pretty toxic.

Nicads are also recyclable. You can drop them off at your local Radio Shack. (Nicads seem to be getting phased out in favor of less toxic and better-performing NiMH batteries.)

My city's garbage hauler takes batteries with my curbside recycling for free, so I feel a little less guilt in using non-rechargable batteries for most uses. Here you can look up drop-off locations in the US that take rechargable batteries for recycling, and this is a company that has what seems like a pretty easy-to-use battery recycling program (for $8 plus shipping they'll recycle a 2 gallon bucket of batteries for you; look for the "pail mail" link).

Radio Shack sends their dead rechargeables out to RBRC for recycling. RBRC will take any NiCD, NiMH or LiIon battery or battery pack (and lead-acid batteries up to 2 pounds.) Beats putting cadmium into the environment.

Yeah, but compare the two:

I buy a thousand batteries in my lifetime, each one of them going into a landfill somewhere. Make up whatever happens at this point when the landfill's bladder breaks and water seeps into the areas with the batteries. Water table, here I come!

I buy a significantly smaller amount of batteries which are rechargeable, reusing them as much as I can until they don't hold a charge anymore. Then what do I do? I contact people who can help me recycle my used rechargeable batteries and keep each one from hitting the landfill.

I use a tiny bit of electricity instead of filling with old, rust-greedy batteries a piece of land someone's bound to turn into a playground one day.

Please do not just throw away dead batteries. Please recycle them.

I use tons of NiMH batteries in my various gadgets.

The prices aren't the best, but REI has all you probably need right here.

Battery Barn has some good prices.

There's an industry initiative to recycle batteries from laptops, phones and other consumer products. This does not apply to Alkaline batteries, so you'll have to keep discarding those AAs. Spent NiCAD and LiON batteries can be recycled at Home Depot, Target, Radio Shack, Best Buy, Sears or Wal-mart or for more information click here.

Actually, we need someone to do for computers what the Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation does for rechargable batteries. Batteries stamped with the RBRC logo are accepted (free) by local recycling points. (Radio Shack is one, in the DC area at least.)

Of course, the battery manufacturers have to pay to use the RBRC logo, so you pay a little more for an RBRC-logo'd battery, but it beats the environmental cost of dropping a UPS-battery-sized load of lead into a local landfill every time one of those big suckers needs to be replaced.