I've made my own 10 button Tv remote 8 months ago and replaced it's battery 9v battery with an 18650 after 2 months of use. I have not recharged it since. So a fully charged 18650 lasts 3 times longer than zinc 9v. pretty satisfactory.
Every year we throw billions of empty batteries in landfills.
Many ideas have been discussed over the years, many projects have been drafted (e.g.: AA cells with Micro-USB charging feature), yet still every remote of the planet keeps eating standard AA/AAA cells.
In your opinion, why is this obsolete piece of technology so difficult to eradicate? Is the problem on the technical side or more on the political side?
Thank you in advance for all your thoughts.
I would sin-tax em if i were a dictator, while forcing companies to make their devices not only with replaceable battery, but forcing them to share a battery type among each other. Imagine, if you could put apple's 4000mAh battery into samsung or vice versa. Who gives a s#*t about phone thicknesses.
But the main problem isn't the dispose-ability of battery, but the fact it's quite expensive to collect and separate batteries when there are so many people who know jack-s#*t about em
I think this is completely unfounded. It is much more expensive even in the long term to use rechargeables than disposables.
Quick math:
8x AA Rechargeable + charger = £22.22 (£2.775 per cell)
100x AA Disposable = £21.99 (£0.21 per cell)
This means a rechargeable cell costs roughly 13 times more than a disposable.
In the most common use for AA batteries (remote controls), batteries last 1-2 years; to get your money's worth out of a rechargeable set you'd have to use the same set for about 20 years. There are no rechargeables with a lifetime of 20 years of continuous duty, even the TV's average life cycle is 7.5 years, the charger will probably break or get lost many times by then. And you also have to live with not using the TV remote for 8-12 hours because the batteries are charging, every few months, for 20 years.
You are trolling, right? Because you have picked exactly the one use case where rechargeable batteries are a poor choice because of poor self-discharge behavior and low current requirements. And built your entire argument on that 
AA cells are used in tons of other things than clocks and TV remotes - many toys (e.g. Legos, Furbys, ...), some cheap cameras, wireless game controllers (e.g. Xbox, Oculus Quest, Wii ...), some home appliances use them (various mini vaccuum cleaners, electric potato peelers, etc.).
If you have kids and they have a game console that uses a game controller powered by AA cells, you will realize the advantage of having recheargeables on hand pretty quickly. E.g. my Quest goes through a set of batteries in the controllers every few days when I am using it regularly. And no, an integrated lithium battery wouldn't be better - AA cell you can swap and continue playing, with a non-replaceable battery you are SOL until it recharges, so Oculus (and Nintendo before them) knew exactly why they decided to use AAs instead.
Kid's stuff are mostly AA powered cause I think, China doesn't have much skill with using li-polys... I've seen far too many "ipod nano" clones rc toys, specially those made by silverlite (pretty popular where I live) with ballooned batteries. And when they die, you need to know soldering to replace em. Thus very few people buy em and go for AA model instead.
My Tecsun shortwave radio (PL-310ET) takes 3 AA batteries. You can choose between 2 different modes... either to put in regular batteries or set it to NiMH batteries. When you set it to NiMH batteries, it lets you charge them inside the radio through the mini USB port!

Great solution to use standard AA size NiMH (and not some custom internal battery pack). This way I can easily swap them out with a new set of charged batteries if needed, or plug it in the wall to charge them in the radio (while the radio is still on even)! I wish more devices were designed like that!
Same for fuji cameras, which can work on voltages of anywhere between 3.8-6v. This allows you to power them directly from power bank.
Too bad that the company wants to sell you an adapter (a plastic with 2 metal nubs connected to a wire) for allowing you to do so. I said f it to it and i'll be making one out of delrin and bronze

Same goes for their rr-80 remote. I saw it's schematic online and made myself a wired copy and I already have a wireless one in the making.
About wall clocks having AA, I'm slowly replacing them with my own PoE IoT (local network) clocks cause the standard quarts clocks are too inaccurate for my taste (they go off by 5 minutes every month, donno why so much deviation.
Remotes are by far the most common use for AA / AAA cells. Other common uses also have the same profile, low power long life: clocks, thermostats, doorbells, sensors, wireless mice / keyboards etc. The recent game controllers from Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo are rechargeable now, digital cameras have made the switch long time ago and all the other stuff is a small market comparatively.
The only area where it might be more economical to use rechargeables is with toys. Even if the number of users is low (1 in 10 households ?) the use is quite intense for a few years, so it's probably more cost effective to use rechargeables.
Too bad. most of those console remotes are with hard to replace batteries, unlike 8bitdo.
We’ve got a wireless keyboard near the tv pc and it has solar cells on it. Been going okay for maybe ten years. Never have to put it by the window, just leave it sitting in the middle of the room. Might take a bit of extra space, but a remote could also have them.
10 years? at first I thought did such a thing exist back then, then I realized time moved on and I stayed behind :p.
But my 5 year old rapoo mouse is pretty fine for me...even though I had to change the wheel encoder and a button nub (not the whole button, since it wore off from friction of wheel rubbing it) inside of the mouse. I charge their NiMh every 3 months