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I think that for now lithium mining is quite expensive, and will potentially get more expensive when everything needs batteries and finding large deposits becom
by grapeskin 4y ago
I think that for now lithium mining is quite expensive, and will potentially get more expensive when everything needs batteries and finding large deposits becomes more difficult.
On the other hand, there’s so much oil flowing that we have periods where the biggest problem is finding where we can store it. Amounts of plastic needed for general consumer uses are often measured in pennies (or less) so there hasn’t been any drive to even consider recycling from the producer side.
But it’s also possible huge lithium deposits will be found that lower prices, or we’ll find a cheaper alternative battery that makes disposability a more obvious solution than recycling. But as another data point, lead acid car batteries are generally recycled. Lithium batteries are very different, but they’ll likely face similar motivations due to cost.
- pkdpic 4y agoThat's a really excellent point about existing car battery recycling / safe disposal. Imperfect as I'm sure it is. Concrete precedent though.
- aidenn0 4y agoThis does partly rely on it being cheaper to extract lithium from spent batteries than it is to mine. Lead acid batteries are easy to recycle because there is exactly one chemistry used in car batteries. LiIon is not yet as standard.
- iostream24 4y agoThe chemistry varying isn’t the real world issue, as I understand it, it’s the varying interconnection and cell packaging… aka the plastic and the inter-cell wiring. Snip snip, a lot slower than it should be, and the actual packages and cell trays should be standardized as well.
- throwntoday 4y agoLithium is very abundant, and methods for extracting from dried lake beds or sea water are under way. Nickel is a far greater concern.