The mane obstacle to properly disposing of batteries is finding a suitable dummy load. There's always connecting them to the Accucell 8150, but wasting all that energy to make heat is mind numbingly stupid in this age of global warming. The lion kingdom believes an LED display, cooling fan, or water extraction from air would be more noble ways of disposing of a battery. There are rarer needs for dummy loads, like testing a power supply. It takes 3 LEDs in parallel 2 days to discharge a 3Ah battery.
The mane need is for the dummy load to scale to any voltage & current. A boost converter followed by a linear converter is the typical way it's done for constant voltage LEDs. For a variable voltage peltier cooler, just the boost converter would do the job.
The problem with cooling fans is they cut off at fairly high voltages. LED's go down to 2.0V.
It needs to show input voltage, output voltage, some kind of current with user selectable values. A bog standard Riden would be the easiest way to draw down to 6V but no lower. A joule thief coupled with it would be required to draw lower.
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If the battery has gone through many charge cycles then the energy in the last cycle is negligible in the scheme of things. You probably consumed more energy creating this post. But maybe you could use it to help boil a cuppa.
I don't throw out alkaline cells until they have been fully exhausted in remote controls, electronic scales, and similar minuscule drain devices.
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