Recycling vs extraction, as a technical process? No. But the effort of locating, transporting and reselling material is much more expensive, proportionally, a

Recycling vs extraction, as a technical process? No. But the effort of locating, transporting and reselling material is much more expensive, proportionally, at the current scale. Recycling a battery is not something that can be done locally, so it can require freight shipping. The end product may be a very small amount of materials that is too small to justify hiring salesmen. The flow of product is far too unreliable. Still, it's economical to recycle batteries for the heavy metals alone. Recycling lithium would require an additional step (similar to the final steps of processing lithium brine, but simpler) that currently isn't done. Its cheaper to recycle than to extract even lithium, but the value of lithium in a battery is a couple dozen times less than the heavy metals.