[KleerKut]

The lack of ideas working towards reducing and reusing before recycling is deeply disturbing to me. My understanding is that many people and companies will consider a battery dead at a point where it still has a great deal of life left for other uses. There are plenty of places selling gently used, or even completely unused batteries at deep discount, which is great for solar and smaller vehicles like bikes. The weight isn't much of a concern for stationary solar beyond initial shipping, and a few extra pounds on a bike to get the same range for much cheaper than new has served me well. I would love to see shops pop up reusing batteries for bikes, golf carts, and more. I'm happy to see many gas powered bikes and golf carts in my area being replaced with electric.

Calling for legislation to recycle batteries without regard to the order of the 3 R's seems quite wasteful and likely to inhibit innovation with small scale solar and smaller electric transportation. Reduce, reuse, then recycle seems like a better idea than skipping the first two steps.

[stubish]

I keep seeing these articles, and I can't help thinking it is a solution looking for a problem and being popularized by various interests to make EVs look less green. People and companies want to use these old batteries. Why pay for a brand new battery to stick in a shed when you can use a much cheaper 10 year old car battery for the same purpose? Or my ride on lawn mower, which doesn't need a 250km range. But it isn't much cheaper, because you can't actually buy 10 year old car batteries. They are scarce. Where are these piles of millions of batteries, like the piles of millions of tires? Sure, we will want to recycle them eventually, but in a non-wasteful world that will be in about 20 years time. Do the research, put together your recycling business plans, and be ready when there is actually a market. Pleading for funding to recycle perfectly useful batteries people want to buy is just wrong.

[jaclaz]

There was a thread/article some time ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29110314

about a wired article according to which some car manufacturers (at the moment) are just storing them (in Oklahoma City).