That was brought home to me, when I asked the guy that I shared an office why they used band new non rechargeable batteries for each run of a particular experim

That was brought home to me, when I asked the guy that I shared an office why they used band new non rechargeable batteries for each run of a particular experiment - testing how to improve mixing for the chemical industry. He commented that some of the runs cost 20k (about 10x my salary at the time) in chemicals to fill the tank (this was a full size 1:1 experiment) so using a brand new set every time made sense - and also the environmental cost of disposing of the several tons of chemicals was not trivial either.