> The lithium is not recycled, due to economies of scale. That's part of it, but even if we had very large battery recycling operations it probably still isn't

> The lithium is not recycled, due to economies of scale. That's part of it, but even if we had very large battery recycling operations it probably still isn't really worth it. It's not hard to get 90%+ recovery but the amount of lithium in a battery is ~3% by weight. Spodumene, one of the important lithium ores, is up to 8% lithium. > Same for the graphite. Graphite is more of a technical thing, it's pretty difficult to extract it and it's pretty worn down. The physical structure is very important to performance and manufacturing is virtually all of the cost of creating graphite- so having the actual raw material isn't worth all that much. More than graphite, I'd actually prefer to see the organic materials in a li ion battery dissolved off and then distilled. That isn't economical though. > There is no foreseeable shortage of either graphite or lithium, with the scale that we use it, and the scale that it can be found in the wild. With any scale we could use it, there's no way we would run out. If we mined as much lithium as we do lead, we would have enough to make every car electric with ~200 kWh batteries and no recycling. And as I said, lithium is more common than lead. > Are there any concerns to the mining of either element? I've seen some scare posts, but don't know enough about them to know if they were worth taking seriously. Graphite is mined in the same places coal is, but very roughly 5 orders of magnitude less. It can also be created completely synthetically from any organic matter, same way they make charcoal or carbon fiber. Lithium as it is currently mined is one of the least environmentally impactful extractions. It uses up a lot of groundwater which is a problem in some places, but it's more about it not being replenished properly. There's no runoff like there is with heavy metals in Africa. There's pretty insignificant land use. The chemicals used in purification are super benign- things like lime or acid, in millionths or billionths of global use. Brine mining means you don't need to dump any rock anywhere, there's no hole, there's no significant dust or blasting- it's just a very large water well.