[l_camacho84]

Australia is not utilising only 14% of their resources, they have only 14% of the known world resources. More than 50% is based on Congo were the work is performed in miserable conditions. We are all happy that we still don’t reach peak oil, but if we don’t change the way we think about progress and economic growth, in a world with finite resources will have severe consequences.

[ajross]

Unlike petroleum, batteries are almost 100% recyclable. Our "peak battery" is bounded at the product of "peak population" and per-capita battery need, both of which are fairly constrained. Not really the right analysis.

[dredmorbius]

The most-recycled material in the US presently is a battery electrolyte: lead.

Reuse rate is only 68%.

That's a 32% reduction in stock per generation.

High rates of recycling are possible in theory, yes, but have not been demonstrated in practice. The loss rate over n generations for a recovery rate r (percent/100) is r^n. At a 90% recovery rate, you've lost 50% of initial stock in 7 generations.

https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/recycle/

https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/recycle/my...

[ajross]

Unrecycled material isn't "lost"[1]. Those batteries are still in landfills and can be recovered at least as easily as ore can be mined. Economics will fix this for us. Increase the price of lead and at some point it becomes worthwhile to scavenge those landfills for old batteries (or to use alternative battery chemistries, etc...).

[1] Though in a handful of cases it gets dispersed in a way that's very difficult to recover. I mentioned phosphorus in another post: P is being unsustainably pulled out of rocks and put into biomass, where it gets flushed into the oceans. Figuring out a way to get it back out is a far bigger mess than mere cobalt recycling is going to be. But even there economics will save us as fertilizer costs make recovery new techniques worthwhile.

[justinator]

> Unlike petroleum, batteries are almost 100% recyclable.

Not using current technology. You can't recycle lithium (for example) using smelting. It's also not very profitable.

It's still very much an unsolved problem.

I would love to be proved wrong!

Edit: I don't know why this is being downvoted. Using current recycling methods, the lithium is not recyclable (the cobalt is). I then asked if I am not correct, to please correct me.

So if not recycled, what's currently happening to lithium batteries in all our electronics and car batteries (etc)? Is it just handled as hazardous waste?

[ajross]

> Not using current technology. You can't recycle lithium (for example) using smelting. It's also not very profitable.

Lithium is not a limiting resource for battery production, it's actually fairly common in the earth's crust. The limit is cobalt[1].

Extracting cobalt from a junked battery is orders of magnitude cheaper than mining and smelting it from the (very diffuse) ores that are available.

[1] Also, per the article, nickel, which surprises me so much that I suspect it's wrong. Per wikipedia nickel reserves are 30x yearly production, and of course new exploration and extraction techniques are always pushing the reserve number up.

[xyzzyz]

Are you suggesting we know how to extract lithium from a random mix of many minerals, but getting it out of the used battery is beyond our capabilities? That’s not very believable.

The real issue is that, just as you hint, it’s actually cheaper to get lithium from mineral rich dirt, than to set up collection, disassembly and recovery operation for existing batteries. We can do it, it’s just not most economically efficient way to get raw lithium. If lithium goes up in price, it might become viable.

[justinator]

> That’s not very believable.

Can you point me to a recycling facility that's doing this?

[ajross]

No, because it's far cheaper to mine it. As mentioned above, you've been fooled by the name of the technology and are looking at the wrong part of the periodic table.

[justinator]

> No, because it's far cheaper to mine it.

OK, question answered.

> As mentioned above, you've been fooled by the name of the technology and are looking at the wrong part of the periodic table.

I asked about lithium recycling. How am I being fooled?

[Obi_Juan_Kenobi]

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-lithium-ion...

Not really there yet, but it's ultimately a very solvable problem: the elements are right there and in high concentrations.

[tyu100]

There is tons of cobalt in the world (pun intended). In Canada alone there are at least a dozen junior miners with prospects looking for capital (there's even a town called Cobalt in Ontario from a previous mining era). It's just not economic to mine at current prices. This is a non-issue and I'm disappointed Nature published this dumb article.

[l_camacho84]

The question is not how many resources we have, the question is how hard they are to extract. The more resources we extract from earth the more difficult they become to extract, that is, we need to apply more resources/pollution/energy/technology to extract the same ton of cobalt that we used in the past. This turn this problem in an exponential one, I don’t know when we will need to face it but I understand the concern of Nature (pun intended).

[ryanianian]

Is your comment to say that cobalt should simply be more expensive to compensate for the negative externalities of obtaining it?

[jeffreyrogers]

I think he's saying that eventually we will run out of economically viable to extract resources and we should start planning for that now. I'm not quite so sure because there are still tons of people living in awful conditions and they need a lot of this resource extraction to raise their standard of living.

[ghein]

People here really misunderstand and misapply the concept of economically viable to extract.

As cheaper sources are exhausted, the more expensive ones become viable. So we won't run out on the projected time horizon.

The main reason why US and Australian rare earth production has gone away is because Chinese sources are so much cheaper (aka no pollution or safety regs). No production, no exploration, and no development of rare earth sources.

As cheap production goes away, people again look for, build, and use other sources.

[l_camacho84]

Many people need this resources, including our children. That’s why we need to slow down our crave for things and enjoy what we have. We don’t need to change cars every 4 year, we don’t need to commute as we do, we don’t need all the clothes, we don’t need to eat meat at every meal. Also we don’t need to work in useless jobs only to have money to buy useless things. We need to reconnect with nature and with each other.

[jeffreyrogers]

I agree that the consumption isn't sustainable long term. At the same time, consumption of clothes, food, household goods, etc. in rich countries helped China to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by giving them better paying manufacturing jobs.

[stevew20]

Lol

[zjaffee]

Resource extraction under capitalist, fascist or otherwise non socially minded governments has been shown to hinder growth in regions where high amounts of valuable natural resources are available since elites can leverage the low cost of labor to extract said resources.

Planning on a backup plan and providing large numbers of jobs through factories to increase the value of labor in these places is a much better way to increase the standard of living other without installing socialist governments.

[scythe]

It seems like the implication is that poverty in the Congo is the result of cobalt extraction. This is not supported by my understanding of the history. During the Rwandan civil war of the early 90s, Tutsi rebels with Western weapons -- rebelling against a Hutu-led genocide of Tutsis -- followed defeated Hutu factions into the Congo, ostensibly to prevent their resurgence. The resulting cross-border conflict led to the near-collapse of the Congolese government and a prolonged civil war that continues to this day.

Other countries with large resource extraction industries, such as Chile and Norway, have been able to take advantage of the profits to build their economy, thanks to their political stability. The resource curse can clearly be lifted by a suitably durable politics.