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The U.S. is in a bad way concerning the concept of "disposable" products, even to the point of considering products disposable when they can be easily recharged, refurbished or recycled. Electronics (including batteries) may be the single largest category of products that regularly get thrown away in perfectly good working order, and often landfilled as perfectly-functioning products. They are also renowned for the amounts of heavy metals and poisons they carry, and which end up in groundwater when landfilled, making them particularly bad to simply throw away. You'd think that would be enough of a reason for people to stop simply tossing them aside... but there you go.
It's a social phenomena, and it needs to be un-learned by Americans, or (sad to say) forced upon them by requiring them to take extra effort, like returning items to retailers/shops for battery replacement, taking batteries to proper recycling centers, or to be fined outright for their laziness--said fines to undo the damage done by improper disposal.
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