8 ms·

What Will Happen to All the Dead Electric Car Batteries?

65 points by disqard 6y ago

carpedimebagjoe 6y ago
Seems like another bait article intentionally-espousing an unpopular/wrong/un-held position to elicit "engagement" IYAM, basically trolling the readers. If not and the journalist were authentically dim, then leave it to the pessimism of British MSM to smear FUD like Nutella on specific, immediate, essential solutions to an existential emergency so we can delay, bikeshed, and hand-wring about how ICEs, burning FFs, and net positive GHGEs are so much better than all this EV claptrap. In the larger picture, it seems like there's always a social opportunist who will automatically espouse the opposite of a prevailing-but-sensible view to garner some sort of following.. like flat earthers but without meetings or conventions.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
peterburkimsher 6y ago
I'm still hanging on to the swollen battery I took out of my MacBook, even though I know it's a fire risk. Buying a real battery for a 2014 MacBook Pro 15" A1398 isn't possible, because Apple says they're obsolete. (long live laptops with USB-A and HDMI!). I bought a third-party battery, labelled Simplo but apparently made by someone else. It idles at 12V. The original Apple battery idles at 2V, and "wakes up". The third-party battery killed my logic board about a month after I fitted it, when lifted the lid to wake from sleep while outside. I tried moving the Compeq PCB from the official battery to the new cells, but in the process, got an undervoltage on the TI controller chip BQ20Z45, which set the PF flag (permanent failure). To clear the PF flag, I need an "unseal" password, which isn't the same as the one that Charlie Miller discovered. I wrote a fuzzer, but it'll take 340 days to run. Be2Works haven't answered their email. So in conclusion: even when your batteries are swollen, they're still better than the fakes. Trying to fix them can make it worse. Don't throw out your Smart Battery control boards.
- Stratoscope 6y ago
  > Buying a real battery for a 2014 MacBook Pro 15" A1398 isn't possible, because Apple says they're obsolete. Are you f------ kidding me? You have just ruined my night. Figuratively speaking, of course. I won't shoot the messenger! But I have an A1398 sitting here that's been idle for a few years, ever since the battery started puffing up every time it warmed up and pushed out the center of the bottom case so far that the rubber feet at the four corners were lifted off the table and it would start to twirl as you type. The machine is in perfect shape otherwise, and even if I'm not using it any more, I'd hoped I could have a new battery put in and give it to someone who would get many more years use out of it. If there is a solution that would get a safe and reliable new battery into it without futzing with chips, I would be all ears!
  - csense 6y ago
    > I'd hoped I could have a new battery put in Then you should have bought a PC with a battery you can take out, instead of Apple's garbage. Apple makes their stuff specifically non-disassemblable by third parties. If you buy Apple hardware, you get a repair if Apple wants to give you one, and you pay the price Apple wants you to pay. I'm proud to say I've never bought a piece of Apple hardware in my life. This is one of the many reasons behind that decision. Caveat emptor.
    - Stratoscope 6y ago
      Oh, believe me, that's what I do. This MacBook was a one-off when I needed to do some Apple work. My personal machines and other work machines are all ThinkPads, and I always download and review Lenovo's Hardware Maintenance Manual for each machine before I buy it.
  - pronoiac 6y ago
    I've had good experiences with iPhone batteries from iFixit, and they also have decent directions. I'd recommend them. Looking for that Macbook model, it looks like a 1 or 2 hour process.
fourstar 6y ago
https://americanbatterytechnology.com https://americanbatterytechnology.com seems to be focused on sustainable batteries + recycling. we'll see if it actually pans out but seems promising.
pl-94 6y ago
What means recycling? From 1 kWh you restore 1 kWh? Or from 1 kWh you restore 1 Wh and then publish a report claiming how sustainable is your business?
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  I think it means no landfilling.
kragen 6y ago
This battery waste problem has an epistemological status similar to that of dowsing and witchcraft. Right now there are both articles about how lithium mining is terrible and expensive (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environmen... "The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction"†) and articles like this one about how we're producing a massive waste stream containing high concentrations of valuable metals like lithium, cobalt, and manganese. (A 2600-mAh 18650 cell contains about 800 mg of lithium, and https://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/Aosibo%20IMR18650%202600mAh%20%28Yellow%29%20UK.html https://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/Aosibo%20IMR18650... says it weighs 45 g, so it's 1.78% lithium by weight, 35 times as concentrated as the brine. At US$13k/tonne that's about 1¢ of lithium per battery.) People throwing out valuable metals while other people are spending a lot of money to recover those same valuable metals from highly diluted deposits? This sounds like a case for... capitalism! (This is completely different from the old battery waste problem, where mercury was included in disposable battery electrodes in order to stabilize the battery chemistry, which is a serious toxicity hazard and a real pain in the ass to separate out. That's never been the case with lithium batteries and has even been eliminated from almost all disposable batteries now.) As pointed out in https://xkcd.com/808/ https://xkcd.com/808/, if dowsing could tell you what was under the ground, companies would be using it to make a killing in oil prospecting. If casting hexes on your enemies worked, companies would be using it to make a killing in... killing. Military contracting. (Actually, probably military leaders would.) And, when there's a significant waste stream of lithium batteries available, companies are going to make a killing by buying up these used lithium batteries for 10¢/kg and extracting 23¢/kg of lithium from them. Until then, it's not a problem. Unless somehow modern capitalism is failing to be ruthlessly profit-focused enough. ______ † The Wired article says "500,000 gallons [of water] per tonne of lithium", which, in non-historical-re-enactment units, is 1.9 million liters per tonne, but probably more accurately 2 million liters. That puts the lithium content of the brine at 0.05%.
- ppf 6y ago
  You're assuming that it takes less than 13 cents / kg to extract that lithium.
jeroenhd 6y ago
My guess is that these recycling efforts will go the same way plastic recycling has gone: industry lying about the amount of recycling while secretly burning and dumping the waste somewhere the general public doesn't see. Yes, we all want a battery to be recycled, but recycling batteries is an arduous task that cannot be automated efficiently in any way. No company will spend the man hours on recycling batteries if they're not forced by law, because it's a terrible cost sink. Even with recycling the material gains from taking apart batteries are terrible. Extracting lithium from a cell is damn near impossible, but the other metal parts can be metled down, so my guess would be that when a large amount of batteries reach their end of life, they'll just be burned and molten, possibly with some filter attached to the smoke stack that'll do the absolute legal minimum to protect the people and environment from the toxic fumes. Or, what might happen is what has happened to plastic "recycling", we export the stuff to third world countries who offer to "recycle" the stuff for cheap, where they'll just end up in a landfill, waiting for the occasional fire. Sure, these companies tout that they're going to recycle all of these used batteries right now, but in the end I have very little faith that they'll actually give a damn about recycling. They're not even recycling used cars for more than their metallic elements, so why would we ever believe that they're going to recycle something as complicated as a battery pack?
- ppf 6y ago
  You speak the truth. "Recycling" is mostly a sham, that we allow to soothe our consciences for living such an unsustainable lifesytle. A close friend of mine gained a Masters's degree in the subject, intending to work towards our new utopian recycling society, and even he doesn't complain any more when I tell him that the best thing we can do with our "Recycling" is highly controlled incineration and heat extraction.
jude- 6y ago
They're recycling them. Saved you a click.
danans 6y ago
I'm surprised that the article didn't mention the intermediate use case of stationary storage, which can extend the life of batteries many more years before they need to be recycled for raw materials.
- foepys 6y ago
  This will only push the problem by a few years. After that recycling is still necessary.
  - theshrike79 6y ago
    Batteries will last a good decade in vehicle use, then another decade for grid storage. VW is already attempting to recycle 95% of their batteries: https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/02/lithium-to-lithium-manganese-to-manganese.html https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/02/lithium... We've got 20 years to improve our recycling process from that. I'm not majorly worried.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    Doubling the useful life of the battery is more than marginally useful. Reuse is much better than recycling when you can do it.
    - throwawayboise 6y ago
      GP is still right -- eventually the batteries will need to be recycled or disposed of in some way.
      - epistasis 6y ago
        It was the initial comment mentioning reuse that said recycling was necessary after reuse. So I'm not sure what that comment added to the discussion...
      - adgjlsfhk1 6y ago
        The problem with that argument is that with how long lithium ion batteries can be reused, there aren't any big lithium ion batteries at end of life, so it's too early to expect to see them being recycled yet. The first cars with these batteries are less than a decade old, so we're still probably a decade or 2 away from the point that there are enough big batteries reaching end of life that it's worth recycling them.
adgjlsfhk1 6y ago
This article seems to be making a few pretty big mistakes. First of all is the 5% of batteries are recycled figure. The first problem with this is that it's unclear if that is accounting for capacity or not. Recycling a 100kWh battery in a car matters a lot more than a 2500mAh battery from a phone. Also, it doesn't account for the amount of batteries that are re-used. Batteries that have lost 25% of their maximum capacity is probably no longer useful in a car, but still fine for grid storage, where price matters a lot more than volume or weight. Recycling a battery is really stupid if it can be reused, so I'm really disappointed that this article didn't mention battery reuse at all.
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  It's not a pretty big mistake, it is very intentionally trying to create drama as if this was somehow an unsolved problem threatening Humanity only to then conclude that EV batteries are both heavily regulated and economically valuable. It's just a fluff tech piece like most mainstream tech reporting.
  - azinman2 6y ago
    Seems like valid concerns to me. Who is taking the batteries and putting them into grids? Do we reach a limit and then what if there’s no market to buy them? If the world is going to change over to EVs, that’s a big scale of a problem that needs to be thought through or bad things will happen.
    - cbo100 6y ago
      If there was nobody left to buy used batteries for storage, then there would still be plenty of recyclers looking to buy them. And the people who bought a 25% worn battery for storage would be looking for another new one at some point, at which time they will sell the old one off for recycling.
      - azinman2 6y ago
        So a time and resource intensive process for recycling giant heavy objects that can explode will be effective in every country of the planet at the scale of every car? I’m not saying it couldn’t be true, but I’m quite skeptical…
type_enthusiast 6y ago
What will happen to all the used gasoline?
- 11235813213455 6y ago
  We recycle it, with our lungs
- theshrike79 6y ago
  This is the weird disconnect we're having. People are SO VERY WORRIED about the emissions from EV battery use and their recycling. But at the same time digging up fossil fuels and literally burning them up in smoke is perfectly fine somehow?
  - kvgr 6y ago
    Well digging heavy metals and trashing them concentrated to landfills is also no joke so worries are in place. But the reporting on these issues is trash. The same applies to solar panels. Some countries have good rules to recycle. Some dont. And in the long term we will see some bad results.
  - lloeki 6y ago
    Nasty psychological perception trick: smoke is hardly visible compared to quarries and landfills, and there is visibly more atmosphere volume than ground surface.
    - ppf 6y ago
      Personally, my issue with EV battery (and electronics!) lifecycles is for precisely the opposite reason - the quarries and landfills in question are far far away from the places where EVs are actually used. All that most people will see is a local reduction in air pollution, so unless the topic is discussed, the general perception will be that all is well.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      Also for some reason journalists have a lot of stock photos to choose from for quarries and landfills, but I guess stock photographers just don't like making trips to say Galveston, TX and extremely visible, devastating "beauty" of oil refining.
kregasaurusrex 6y ago
Hopefully Google doesn't tell us to collectively throw them into the ocean and recharge the electric eels. [0] While cylindrical 18650's can be opened and unrolled carefully without being shorted, it's difficulty to quickly and reliably do at scale. Many other designs like flat-packs used in phones are too difficult to extract the lithium from, where the rarer metals like cobalt are the target components instead. [1] Extracting lithium isn't cost-effective due to its abundance in the earth. [0] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39540/google-tells-search-users-its-a-good-idea-to-throw-car-batteries-into-the-ocean https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39540/google-tells-search-user... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling#Lithium_ion_batteries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling#Lithium_ion_...
scotty79 6y ago
I think we shoud force manufacturers of the stuff to take back in the garbage it becomes. To be allowed to sell n batteries you need to buy k*n from the garbage collectors. Then just fine tune k, but it can't be 0. That would provide money flow from people that make vast amounts of money from making things that will ultimately become the garbage, to the people that are dealing with that garbage. I don't think the batteries are the problem yet, but we might start doing this with manufacturers of plastic packaging.
jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 6y ago
People are starting to think about this problem (and by problem I don't mean a problem on the same scale as global warming). Notably, former Tesla CTO JB Straubel started a company doing battery recycling called Redwood Materials. We already have a metals recycling industry today (scrap yards and aluminum recycling) so I don't see why we can't have the same for batteries. Yes, they have to be handled using special processes to avoid fires but that is just an engineering hurdle that will be overcome. Car batteries easier to recycle than consumer electronics, because cars are already scrapped when they get too old because the raw materials in them have value. Consumer electronics are more difficult because the metals in them are in smaller quantities and so people won't want to drive to the recycling center to earn themselves 50¢ but a car may have several hundred dollars in raw materials. Also note that because the global EV industry is currently scaling and because it may take decades for a car battery to wear out, companies in this space will take time to grow because there just aren't enough dead car batteries out there to make mass scale recycling commercially viable yet.

65 points by disqard 6y ago

Seems like another bait article intentionally-espousing an unpopular/wrong/un-held position to elicit "engagement" IYAM, basically trolling the readers. If not and the journalist were authentically dim, then leave it to the pessimism of British MSM to smear FUD like Nutella on specific, immediate, essential solutions to an existential emergency so we can delay, bikeshed, and hand-wring about how ICEs, burning FFs, and net positive GHGEs are so much better than all this EV claptrap. In the larger picture, it seems like there's always a social opportunist who will automatically espouse the opposite of a prevailing-but-sensible view to garner some sort of following.. like flat earthers but without meetings or conventions.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

peterburkimsher 6y ago

I'm still hanging on to the swollen battery I took out of my MacBook, even though I know it's a fire risk. Buying a real battery for a 2014 MacBook Pro 15" A1398 isn't possible, because Apple says they're obsolete. (long live laptops with USB-A and HDMI!). I bought a third-party battery, labelled Simplo but apparently made by someone else. It idles at 12V. The original Apple battery idles at 2V, and "wakes up". The third-party battery killed my logic board about a month after I fitted it, when lifted the lid to wake from sleep while outside. I tried moving the Compeq PCB from the official battery to the new cells, but in the process, got an undervoltage on the TI controller chip BQ20Z45, which set the PF flag (permanent failure). To clear the PF flag, I need an "unseal" password, which isn't the same as the one that Charlie Miller discovered. I wrote a fuzzer, but it'll take 340 days to run. Be2Works haven't answered their email. So in conclusion: even when your batteries are swollen, they're still better than the fakes. Trying to fix them can make it worse. Don't throw out your Smart Battery control boards.

Stratoscope 6y ago
> Buying a real battery for a 2014 MacBook Pro 15" A1398 isn't possible, because Apple says they're obsolete. Are you f------ kidding me? You have just ruined my night. Figuratively speaking, of course. I won't shoot the messenger! But I have an A1398 sitting here that's been idle for a few years, ever since the battery started puffing up every time it warmed up and pushed out the center of the bottom case so far that the rubber feet at the four corners were lifted off the table and it would start to twirl as you type. The machine is in perfect shape otherwise, and even if I'm not using it any more, I'd hoped I could have a new battery put in and give it to someone who would get many more years use out of it. If there is a solution that would get a safe and reliable new battery into it without futzing with chips, I would be all ears!
- csense 6y ago
  > I'd hoped I could have a new battery put in Then you should have bought a PC with a battery you can take out, instead of Apple's garbage. Apple makes their stuff specifically non-disassemblable by third parties. If you buy Apple hardware, you get a repair if Apple wants to give you one, and you pay the price Apple wants you to pay. I'm proud to say I've never bought a piece of Apple hardware in my life. This is one of the many reasons behind that decision. Caveat emptor.
  - Stratoscope 6y ago
    Oh, believe me, that's what I do. This MacBook was a one-off when I needed to do some Apple work. My personal machines and other work machines are all ThinkPads, and I always download and review Lenovo's Hardware Maintenance Manual for each machine before I buy it.
- pronoiac 6y ago
  I've had good experiences with iPhone batteries from iFixit, and they also have decent directions. I'd recommend them. Looking for that Macbook model, it looks like a 1 or 2 hour process.

fourstar 6y ago

https://americanbatterytechnology.com https://americanbatterytechnology.com seems to be focused on sustainable batteries + recycling. we'll see if it actually pans out but seems promising.

pl-94 6y ago

What means recycling? From 1 kWh you restore 1 kWh? Or from 1 kWh you restore 1 Wh and then publish a report claiming how sustainable is your business?

CameronNemo 6y ago
I think it means no landfilling.

kragen 6y ago

This battery waste problem has an epistemological status similar to that of dowsing and witchcraft. Right now there are both articles about how lithium mining is terrible and expensive (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environmen... "The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction"†) and articles like this one about how we're producing a massive waste stream containing high concentrations of valuable metals like lithium, cobalt, and manganese. (A 2600-mAh 18650 cell contains about 800 mg of lithium, and https://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/Aosibo%20IMR18650%202600mAh%20%28Yellow%29%20UK.html https://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/Aosibo%20IMR18650... says it weighs 45 g, so it's 1.78% lithium by weight, 35 times as concentrated as the brine. At US$13k/tonne that's about 1¢ of lithium per battery.) People throwing out valuable metals while other people are spending a lot of money to recover those same valuable metals from highly diluted deposits? This sounds like a case for... capitalism! (This is completely different from the old battery waste problem, where mercury was included in disposable battery electrodes in order to stabilize the battery chemistry, which is a serious toxicity hazard and a real pain in the ass to separate out. That's never been the case with lithium batteries and has even been eliminated from almost all disposable batteries now.) As pointed out in https://xkcd.com/808/ https://xkcd.com/808/, if dowsing could tell you what was under the ground, companies would be using it to make a killing in oil prospecting. If casting hexes on your enemies worked, companies would be using it to make a killing in... killing. Military contracting. (Actually, probably military leaders would.) And, when there's a significant waste stream of lithium batteries available, companies are going to make a killing by buying up these used lithium batteries for 10¢/kg and extracting 23¢/kg of lithium from them. Until then, it's not a problem. Unless somehow modern capitalism is failing to be ruthlessly profit-focused enough. ______ † The Wired article says "500,000 gallons [of water] per tonne of lithium", which, in non-historical-re-enactment units, is 1.9 million liters per tonne, but probably more accurately 2 million liters. That puts the lithium content of the brine at 0.05%.

ppf 6y ago
You're assuming that it takes less than 13 cents / kg to extract that lithium.

jeroenhd 6y ago

My guess is that these recycling efforts will go the same way plastic recycling has gone: industry lying about the amount of recycling while secretly burning and dumping the waste somewhere the general public doesn't see. Yes, we all want a battery to be recycled, but recycling batteries is an arduous task that cannot be automated efficiently in any way. No company will spend the man hours on recycling batteries if they're not forced by law, because it's a terrible cost sink. Even with recycling the material gains from taking apart batteries are terrible. Extracting lithium from a cell is damn near impossible, but the other metal parts can be metled down, so my guess would be that when a large amount of batteries reach their end of life, they'll just be burned and molten, possibly with some filter attached to the smoke stack that'll do the absolute legal minimum to protect the people and environment from the toxic fumes. Or, what might happen is what has happened to plastic "recycling", we export the stuff to third world countries who offer to "recycle" the stuff for cheap, where they'll just end up in a landfill, waiting for the occasional fire. Sure, these companies tout that they're going to recycle all of these used batteries right now, but in the end I have very little faith that they'll actually give a damn about recycling. They're not even recycling used cars for more than their metallic elements, so why would we ever believe that they're going to recycle something as complicated as a battery pack?

ppf 6y ago
You speak the truth. "Recycling" is mostly a sham, that we allow to soothe our consciences for living such an unsustainable lifesytle. A close friend of mine gained a Masters's degree in the subject, intending to work towards our new utopian recycling society, and even he doesn't complain any more when I tell him that the best thing we can do with our "Recycling" is highly controlled incineration and heat extraction.

jude- 6y ago

They're recycling them. Saved you a click.

danans 6y ago

I'm surprised that the article didn't mention the intermediate use case of stationary storage, which can extend the life of batteries many more years before they need to be recycled for raw materials.

foepys 6y ago
This will only push the problem by a few years. After that recycling is still necessary.
- theshrike79 6y ago
  Batteries will last a good decade in vehicle use, then another decade for grid storage. VW is already attempting to recycle 95% of their batteries: https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/02/lithium-to-lithium-manganese-to-manganese.html https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/02/lithium... We've got 20 years to improve our recycling process from that. I'm not majorly worried.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Doubling the useful life of the battery is more than marginally useful. Reuse is much better than recycling when you can do it.
  - throwawayboise 6y ago
    GP is still right -- eventually the batteries will need to be recycled or disposed of in some way.
    - epistasis 6y ago
      It was the initial comment mentioning reuse that said recycling was necessary after reuse. So I'm not sure what that comment added to the discussion...
    - adgjlsfhk1 6y ago
      The problem with that argument is that with how long lithium ion batteries can be reused, there aren't any big lithium ion batteries at end of life, so it's too early to expect to see them being recycled yet. The first cars with these batteries are less than a decade old, so we're still probably a decade or 2 away from the point that there are enough big batteries reaching end of life that it's worth recycling them.

adgjlsfhk1 6y ago

This article seems to be making a few pretty big mistakes. First of all is the 5% of batteries are recycled figure. The first problem with this is that it's unclear if that is accounting for capacity or not. Recycling a 100kWh battery in a car matters a lot more than a 2500mAh battery from a phone. Also, it doesn't account for the amount of batteries that are re-used. Batteries that have lost 25% of their maximum capacity is probably no longer useful in a car, but still fine for grid storage, where price matters a lot more than volume or weight. Recycling a battery is really stupid if it can be reused, so I'm really disappointed that this article didn't mention battery reuse at all.

DoingIsLearning 6y ago
It's not a pretty big mistake, it is very intentionally trying to create drama as if this was somehow an unsolved problem threatening Humanity only to then conclude that EV batteries are both heavily regulated and economically valuable. It's just a fluff tech piece like most mainstream tech reporting.
- azinman2 6y ago
  Seems like valid concerns to me. Who is taking the batteries and putting them into grids? Do we reach a limit and then what if there’s no market to buy them? If the world is going to change over to EVs, that’s a big scale of a problem that needs to be thought through or bad things will happen.
  - cbo100 6y ago
    If there was nobody left to buy used batteries for storage, then there would still be plenty of recyclers looking to buy them. And the people who bought a 25% worn battery for storage would be looking for another new one at some point, at which time they will sell the old one off for recycling.
    - azinman2 6y ago
      So a time and resource intensive process for recycling giant heavy objects that can explode will be effective in every country of the planet at the scale of every car? I’m not saying it couldn’t be true, but I’m quite skeptical…

type_enthusiast 6y ago

What will happen to all the used gasoline?

11235813213455 6y ago
We recycle it, with our lungs
theshrike79 6y ago
This is the weird disconnect we're having. People are SO VERY WORRIED about the emissions from EV battery use and their recycling. But at the same time digging up fossil fuels and literally burning them up in smoke is perfectly fine somehow?
- kvgr 6y ago
  Well digging heavy metals and trashing them concentrated to landfills is also no joke so worries are in place. But the reporting on these issues is trash. The same applies to solar panels. Some countries have good rules to recycle. Some dont. And in the long term we will see some bad results.
- lloeki 6y ago
  Nasty psychological perception trick: smoke is hardly visible compared to quarries and landfills, and there is visibly more atmosphere volume than ground surface.
  - ppf 6y ago
    Personally, my issue with EV battery (and electronics!) lifecycles is for precisely the opposite reason - the quarries and landfills in question are far far away from the places where EVs are actually used. All that most people will see is a local reduction in air pollution, so unless the topic is discussed, the general perception will be that all is well.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Also for some reason journalists have a lot of stock photos to choose from for quarries and landfills, but I guess stock photographers just don't like making trips to say Galveston, TX and extremely visible, devastating "beauty" of oil refining.

kregasaurusrex 6y ago

Hopefully Google doesn't tell us to collectively throw them into the ocean and recharge the electric eels. [0] While cylindrical 18650's can be opened and unrolled carefully without being shorted, it's difficulty to quickly and reliably do at scale. Many other designs like flat-packs used in phones are too difficult to extract the lithium from, where the rarer metals like cobalt are the target components instead. [1] Extracting lithium isn't cost-effective due to its abundance in the earth. [0] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39540/google-tells-search-users-its-a-good-idea-to-throw-car-batteries-into-the-ocean https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39540/google-tells-search-user... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling#Lithium_ion_batteries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling#Lithium_ion_...

scotty79 6y ago

I think we shoud force manufacturers of the stuff to take back in the garbage it becomes. To be allowed to sell n batteries you need to buy k*n from the garbage collectors. Then just fine tune k, but it can't be 0. That would provide money flow from people that make vast amounts of money from making things that will ultimately become the garbage, to the people that are dealing with that garbage. I don't think the batteries are the problem yet, but we might start doing this with manufacturers of plastic packaging.

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 6y ago

People are starting to think about this problem (and by problem I don't mean a problem on the same scale as global warming). Notably, former Tesla CTO JB Straubel started a company doing battery recycling called Redwood Materials. We already have a metals recycling industry today (scrap yards and aluminum recycling) so I don't see why we can't have the same for batteries. Yes, they have to be handled using special processes to avoid fires but that is just an engineering hurdle that will be overcome. Car batteries easier to recycle than consumer electronics, because cars are already scrapped when they get too old because the raw materials in them have value. Consumer electronics are more difficult because the metals in them are in smaller quantities and so people won't want to drive to the recycling center to earn themselves 50¢ but a car may have several hundred dollars in raw materials. Also note that because the global EV industry is currently scaling and because it may take decades for a car battery to wear out, companies in this space will take time to grow because there just aren't enough dead car batteries out there to make mass scale recycling commercially viable yet.