According to the European and other countries' legislation, e.g. USA and Japan, used batteries and accumulators are regarded as hazardous waste. In connection with these regulations spent electrochemical power sources are separately collected and sent to recovery and recycling plants. In the highly developed countries yearly collection levels achieved in practice typically surpass 100 g of spent batteries per inhabitant. In this work we present the information about the Polish legislation concerning marketing, collection and recycling of batteries. We also characterize the Polish batteries collection system and give achieved collection levels of used electrochemical power sources in our country. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.