Licensed scrap handler · Southeastern Avenue, Indianapolis
We buy your dead battery and sell you a live one.
Both prices are on the wall and both are dated, because lead moves weekly. An ordinary car battery is worth about $12 to you today, and the cheapest tested one on the shelf is $68.
What we buy
Per pound · set Monday 10 August 2026
- Car and light truck battery$0.29 / lbabout 40 lb each — so roughly $12
- Heavy truck battery, group 31 and up$0.31 / lbabout 62 lb each — so roughly $19
- Marine and deep cycle$0.29 / lbabout 52 lb each — so roughly $15
- Forklift cells, per cell$0.33 / lbabout 118 lb each — so roughly $39
- Golf cart, 6V and 8V$0.30 / lbabout 63 lb each — so roughly $19
- Solar bank, sealed or flooded$0.31 / lbabout 130 lb each — so roughly $40
LME lead, cash settlement was $0.94 / lb on Friday 7 August 2026. Published so the buy price can be argued with. When this moves more than about four cents we re-set on the following Monday, and the date above changes.
What we will not take
Most of what gets carried in. Read this before you drive over.
Swollen, cracked or leaking cases
Acid in the back of a car is a problem for you and a spill in the yard is a problem for us. There is no price at which this is worth it.
The county household hazardous waste day takes them free, four Saturdays a year. We will tell you the next date.
Lithium — anything from a tool pack to an EV module
Different chemistry, different fire risk, and we are not permitted for it. A lithium cell in a lead pile is how a scrap yard burns down.
Two permitted lithium handlers take these locally. We keep both numbers by the phone and will give you either.
Batteries with the terminals cut off
Cut posts mean the lead has already been taken and we are buying a case of plastic and acid. It also usually means the battery was not yours.
Nothing we can do with it. The hazardous waste day again.
Anything you cannot say where it came from
We are a licensed handler and we log every purchase over four units with a name and a plate. That is the licence, not a preference.
Bring identification and it takes an extra ninety seconds.
Sealed units out of a UPS or alarm panel, in ones and twos
We take them, and we will not pay for them — the weight is too low to be worth the paperwork on a single unit.
Drop them free any time and they go into the pallet. Over about thirty we will pay by the pound like anything else.
18%
of what we buy is good enough to sell again.
Last month we bought 412 and 74 passed the test. Everything that does not pass the test goes to a permitted secondary smelter — Doe Run, in Boss, Missouri — on a manifest we keep for three years. Anybody can ask to see one. Anybody who tells you they recondition most of what they take in is selling you something.
On the shelf today
Everything, with the test ruleGroup 35
11 left$68
512 CCA testedrated 640 · 6 months, exchange
Group 24
7 left$68
486 CCA testedrated 600 · 6 months, exchange
Group 65
3 left$84
605 CCA testedrated 750 · 6 months, exchange
Group 31 truck
2 left$119
780 CCA testedrated 950 · 6 months, exchange
The tested figure is what that battery actually made on the load tester, written on the case in marker. It is not the number off the original label, which is what it managed when it was new and is the number everybody else quotes.