It was only recently I learned that “recyclable” meant “theoretically can be recycled”, not that there’s an existing process or, more importantly, economy. Appa

It was only recently I learned that “recyclable” meant “theoretically can be recycled”, not that there’s an existing process or, more importantly, economy. Apparently there isn’t much incentive to extract metals from batteries as is - I don’t know how costs compare to extracting from spent batteries vs ore, but only 3-5% of Lithium batteries are currently recycled (for the nickel and cobalt more than the lithium), the rest, presumably, is landfilled. so it may surprise others that recycling electric car batteries is still an active research area: https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-recycling-lithium/97/i28 https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-re...