How fast does potassium hydroxide turn into potassium carbonate, in the case of leaked AA or AAA batteries? [closed]








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When batteries start to leak, the highly toxic potassium hydroxide comes out, but it reacts with the carbon dioxide in the air and turn into the less toxic potassium carbonate salt. I'm wondering how fast this reaction takes place. Is it on the order of seconds, minutes, days, or weeks? Because I don't know how extra careful I should be in handling leaked batteries in toys.




Despite not being "toxic" how @Poutnik pointed out, this mainly depends on how fast the carbon dioxide from the air goes into the solution that leaked off of the battery.


The actual reaction within the solution is quite fast (<milliseconds) but if you ask how long it takes to transform all the KOH to carbonate, it could be minutes to weeks in my opinion, depending on size of the leakage, amount of leaked substance, layer thickness of the leaked material, temperature etc.


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