[simondotau]

This article is poor, because lithium is just one part of the value contained within EV batteries. Far more valuable is any nickel, cobalt and graphite. Equally valuable is any copper and aluminium. Unless you're effectively recycling a significant number of the major materials, it's not enough.

Furthermore, it's not a remarkable achievement. By contrast to this headline, Redwood Materials claims "Redwood’s technology can recover, on average, more than 95% of materials like nickel, cobalt, copper, aluminum, lithium and graphite in a lithium-ion battery."[0]

[0] https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/recycle-with-us/

[Danox]

It is in Japan’s interest to use the resources at hand around them, in short, do the research whenever possible to consider all options…

[tpm]

> Far more valuable is any nickel, cobalt and graphite. Equally valuable is any copper and aluminium.

All of these metals are already almost fully recycled (not sure about graphite). Lithium is the toughest to recycle and it's not solved yet, so it's right to focus on that, because there will be a lot of lithium electrolyte to dispose in the near future.

[mbgerring]

The battery supply chain is moving away from NMC because of the myriad problems with nickel and cobalt and has been for a long time.

[simondotau]

Yes, LFP is a better chemistry for various reasons including cost. Thankfully this means that nickel and cobalt are not needed for EVs adoption to continue scaling.

For now, NMC remains superior for some high performance applications, as well as for high-end laptops and phones. Yes, there are "myriad" problems with nickel and cobalt. These problems will diminish as scale makes recycling economically competitive to virgin material mining.

At some point the number of EV batteries being disposed will approach equilibrium to the number of new vehicle batteries manufactured. When this happens the amount of virgin nickel and cobalt needed will also approach zero.