Nowadays, due to a great quantity of spent chemical sources of electric energy (batteries) (up to 0.25% of total waste in big cities), the issue of their recycling is very topical. Batteries are not to be utilized with solid household waste, as after destruction of battery cases in conditions of high humidity in solid waste refuse dumps, alkali and heavy metals get into the environment. Toxic substances get into soil and then into ground water and into water bodies. Besides, if solid waste dumps get burned, batteries emit dioxins into the atmosphere. Nevertheless, a spent chemical source of electric energy is a concentration of metals which could and should be recycled. The residue after metal winning (spent slurry) is also to be properly recycled. The paper offers the conditions of recycling primary zinc-manganese chemical sources of electric energy. We crushed spent chemical sources of electric energy, then we divided their components into metal (a steel case, a zinc current lead) and non-metal ones (active mass). From the active mass we extricated hydroxides and salts of ferrum, zinc, and manganese, and the residual matter was dried in. drying oven till it had a fixed weight. In active mass powder, the residue after extracting metals, we stated the particles' morphology and element composition using a scanning electron microscope with an internal energy-dispersive analysis sensor. After heat treatment at 250-300 degrees C and fractionating, active mass powder was used in composites on the basis of high-pressure polyethylene. With the ratio of high-pressure polyethylene and active mass equal to 2.75 : 1, we got a high hardness composite. The average value of the microhardness of the composite is almost 2 times higher than that of the reference materials, and is 70.99 +/- 0.04 kg/mm(2).
