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You're arguing past one another. The parent's working assumption is that concentrated lithium is much cheaper to harvest than trace lithium in natural deposits.

You're arguing past one another. The parent's working assumption is that concentrated lithium is much cheaper to harvest than trace lithium in natural deposits. You seem to be assuming that it is cheaper to mine trace minerals than harvest from existing batteries. Absent any domain knowledge regarding the cost of these two sources of lithium, neither of you can presume to be correct. The only fundamental thing here is that, absent any external pressure, in a capitalistic system, we will see suppliers of lithium prefer the source that is cheaper for them to utilize.

kragen 5y ago
In my comment, I said, "At that point I looked a bit into the hydrometallurgical processes that were available, enough to convince myself that there were no showstopper problems that would make recycling battery waste uneconomical." That seems to be the "domain knowledge" you're referring to? So I didn't presume I was correct; I investigated and found out what was correct. This article has much better domain knowledge than what I was able to dig up at the time, though. I don't think we're arguing past one another at all. The central point of my comment was that people often made the error that crazygringo made; I explained why it was an error. Then, crazygringo responded, reiterating the error. I think my comment was rather precisely targeted at his comment, even though I made it earlier.