The existing plants for the recovery of exhausted alkaline zinc manganese dioxide batteries adopt an initial heat treatment and then a grinding The last operation intermixtures the components of the batteries and consequently the successive recovery process proves to. be rather complicate and needs a large scale plant. An initial dismantling and separation of the anodic, cathodic and packing components allow a successively easier recovery process and a small scale plant. This possibility has been assumed in this work and a simple recovery process has been proposed for the anodic material, consisting of an initial leaching step to separate and recover the unconverted metallic zinc and a successive step of cathodic deposition to recover the converted ionic zinc. A highly efficient zinc recovery has been obtained at the cathodic deposition step by adopting a heat treatment of the anodic material before its leaching process.