Normal car batteries are filled with sulfuric acid and lead plates. Obviously, you can't just dump that. The li-ion batteries that power EVs don't have acid.

Normal car batteries are filled with sulfuric acid and lead plates. Obviously, you can't just dump that. The li-ion batteries that power EVs don't have acid. The majority of the chemicals are actually totally innocuous- the carbon, plastics, electrolytes and about half of the metals are downright boring. Steel, aluminum, copper, polypropylene, carbon- lithium was in all the water you ever drank. I wouldn't drink the electrolyte, but it's basically just fancy grease/oil. The only two dangerous ingredients are nickel and cobalt- they aren't as bad as lead, but they aren't good either. They're also the easiest to extract and the most valuable. To recycle a battery, you dump it into a shredder and then into water. An electrochemical process is used to suck the metal off, a lot like how they plate metal onto things (but in reverse). The leftovers are strained out, ground, and eventually burnt.