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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
Because who cares about lithium recycling? We don't need recycled lithium to maintain battery production. Realistically it's one of those resources like iron or aluminum or phosphorous which we can't meaningfully "run out of".
(Though I threw that last one in deliberately: we're pulling P out of rocks and throwing it into the biosphere at an unsustainable rate right now, and are going to have to radically adjust the way we do agriculture fertilization in the coming decades. But even then there's going to be plenty of P around, we just have to change the sources we use to extract it.)
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...