The article is very, very light with details. The university or research center is not named. No scientist is named. No link. Nothing that tells "look, we're telling you real, solid, serious stuff."
"That said, Japan isn't the only country pursuing lithium recovery. In the US, Redwood Materials – the recycling company founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel – says it's already recovering 95% of lithium from the equivalent of about 250,000 EVs per year."
EV batteries are too large and valuable to wind up in landfills, although I'm sure it has happened somewhere. I do like that Japan is is making it harder to just throw out smaller lithium batteries. That strikes me as a more probable source of waste.
I would add that EV batteries are too flammable to end up in landfills. A few small batteries from things like phones and laptops generally make it through the waste processing chain without rupturing and causing problems, but a large pile of them outside of containment starts becoming a certainty that one will break and set the whole lot on fire.
Yup. Any time you see weasel words, especially this one, whether it's in advertisements, product descriptions, wherever, you can instantly dismiss the product/claim. It's such a quick and easy tell to notice.
Doesn't read like slop to me. The only sentence that could be argued to conflate the two is:
>A new law taking effect this year will require manufacturers and importers to collect and recycle small portable batteries from the likes of phones, vapes, and power tools.
But "recycle" doesn't necessarily mean closed-loop recycling (recycling into the same products). Lithium recovery is a type of open-loop recycling and the surrounding paragraphs talk about lithium recovery so this is a reasonable interpretation.
"That said, Japan isn't the only country pursuing lithium recovery. In the US, Redwood Materials – the recycling company founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel – says it's already recovering 95% of lithium from the equivalent of about 250,000 EVs per year."
EV batteries are too large and valuable to wind up in landfills, although I'm sure it has happened somewhere. I do like that Japan is is making it harder to just throw out smaller lithium batteries. That strikes me as a more probable source of waste.