Actually Tadiran has been making these cells for 30 years and makes many millions each year on totally automated equipment.
You can find Tadiran batteries in toll tags, such as the EZPASS, in automatic water, gas or electric meters, pressure sensors in tires, tracking devices, etc.
Sounds like custom-made, not mass-produced. That should be the case for consumer batteries, but I bet everyone here has opened up a flashlight long idle in the junk drawer that had goo oozing from the batteries, fouling the interior.
Aclara, a manufaturer of automated meter reading products, has its original units operating for over 25 years with Tadiran batteries, without replacements or recharging.
Energy harvesting systems have a lot of parts and thus reduce reliability. In addition they take up space and add cost. Aside from that, the source for the harvested energy may change over the years.
As for recycling them, possibly, but they are a such a small portion of the product stream that fixating on them would be a waste of time for all except troublemakers.
There are not that many applications that really need such a long life, and none of them include consumer products, for which the intended lifespan is six to ten months. Why put a long life battery in a device that will be in the landfill in less than a year?
Using the most low powered electronic devices is certainly a good choice insolving the problem from the other end.
1. They are expensive - maybe too expensive for a consumer product.
2. They suffer from passivation, so you have to keep them in a constant state of discharge - this limits their usefull life to less than a decade.
3. They have limited maximum current draw - a few tens of milliamps.
So they are fime for telemetry applications where the equipment spends most of it's time asleep, but it's a product suitable only for very specific uses.
Now we all know perpetual motion isn't possible. However, when you talk about batteries and the ability to capture energy that would otherwise be considered wasted. It just shows how much potential there is out there. Whether it be capturing the energy of a car as it slows down and generating energy with it, or capturing the energy while one walks I think the opportunities are just endless. And combining enery generation with the advancement of energy storage is just really exciting.
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