There is plenty of investment going into recycling. Basically recycling lithium from spent batteries is vastly easier compared to refining it from naturally occ

There is plenty of investment going into recycling. Basically recycling lithium from spent batteries is vastly easier compared to refining it from naturally occurring deposit that only have tiny trace amounts of it when measured in parts per million. That's why lithium is so expensive. There's no shortage of it but refining it from naturally occurring deposits is a very energy intensive process due to the low concentrations of it even in some of the richer deposits. Recovering it from a batteries that actually contain many kilos of it is going to be not a hard cost equation for a wannabe recycler. In the unlikely case that somebody were to actually dump EV batteries in a landfill that would just create a nice business opportunity for other companies. Much better to sell batteries directly to such companies. But if you are genuinely worried about environmental impact, you should of course be very angry about anything ICE vehicle related where we convert fossil fuels into planet destroying quantities of CO2 without regard to how the oil is mined, how badly it destroys the environment or how many babies the exhaust fumes kill. Exaggerating a little here but just making the point here that there is a bit of double standards here. When it comes to ICE vehicles, nobody gives a shit where their oil comes, how many children were involved mining the Cobalt involved in removing the sulfur from their diesel/petrol (yes, that's a thing). But as soon as we talk EVs people suddenly get hyper critical about how resources are mined and used and where stuff comes from. It's more than a little hypocritical. Yes there are some challenges (and business opportunities) but it pales in comparison to the absolute dumpster fire that is the ICE vehicle industry and its apologists.