[at-fates-hands]

My concern with batteries is we're so gung ho on producing these, we haven't stopped to consider the environmental impact from the manufacturing process or the incredible task of recycling these once they've outlived their usefulness.

It reminds me a lot of when people pushed plastic for everything in order to save the trees and reduce paper consumption. Some 40 years later, we're now trying to get off plastic and dealing with massive environmental issues surrounding nearly every kind of plastic.

[jdietrich]

>we haven't stopped to consider the environmental impact

We have. We've painstakingly analysed the energy and material inputs and the pollution outputs of the entire lifecycle of a lithium battery pack. After considering all these factors, lithium batteries remain an attractive energy storage option.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-48768-7_...

>the incredible task of recycling these once they've outlived their usefulness

Recycling lithium battery packs is complex and hazardous, but no more so than a multitude of other industrial processes. There is already substantial recycling capacity, thanks in part to the EU's WEEE directive. Using existing technologies, only 1% of the pack mass goes to landfill. We can't yet recover all of the lithium in a useful form, but we can recover most of the cobalt.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/978111899197...

[linsomniac]

Back in the late 1800s, city planners met to try to come up with some plan for dealing with "the manure problem". Large cities couldn't handle the amount of manure produced by the horses in the city. They ended the meeting early, because they couldn't come up with any sort of plan.

Then cars came along and they were all like "Yay! The pollution problem is solved!"

I too wonder what the impact of so many lithium batteries is going to be. I mean, I know they are saying that they are extremely recyclable, and I hope that's true. But I wonder what the unintended consequences of this switch is going to be.

[Cthulhu_]

We can look at the current (used) battery market, the disposable Duracell thingies and such. I think there's a good recycling program for them, but even so, part of used batteries end up getting lost and in landfills and such.

[Davertron]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9gnvZLkewg

[ballenf]

(That's the silicon valley clip explaining the London manure problem being solved by the replacement of horses with cars.)

Maybe it's just me, but not a fan of bare links unless the URL is descriptive.

[at-fates-hands]

Not economical to recycle Lithium right now.

Recycled lithium is as much as five times the cost of lithium produced from the least costly brine based process. It is not competitive for recycling companies to extract lithium from slag, or competitive for the OEMs to buy at higher price points from recycling companies. Though lithium is 100% recyclable, currently, recycled lithium reports to the slag and is currently used for non-automotive purposes, such as construction, or sold in the open-markets. However, with the increasing number of EVs entering the market in the future and with a significant supply crunch, recycling is expected to be an important factor for consideration in effective material supply for battery production.

Closed loop recycling, where the recycled materials are sold back to OEMs, is likely to help against potential price fluctuation of metals or compounds. EV battery recycling is expected to play a significant part of the value chain by 2016 when large quantities of EV batteries will come through the waste stream for recycling.

https://waste-management-world.com/a/1-the-lithium-battery-r...

[lr]

This guy actually goes to a lithium "mine" in the middle of the desert...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KX2qw79qpk

[batbomb]

Do you think it’s better or worse than the initial mining?