All mining is bad for the environment to some degree or another. Lithium mining allows us to stop doing other harmful forms of mining, and it is infinitely recy

All mining is bad for the environment to some degree or another. Lithium mining allows us to stop doing other harmful forms of mining, and it is infinitely recyclable; it isn't being blasted away into the atmosphere like gasoline. Eventually, we should have enough in the recycling pipeline that mining it becomes relatively uncommon. If people are willing to pay a price premium for it, then it is apparently possible to mine lithium from the seawater directly: https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/Can-seawater-give-us-lithium-to-meet-our-battery-needs/99/i36 https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/Can-seawat... The researchers claim it has the potential to be very cost effective, but that remains to be seen. Their process sounds very environmentally neutral, which is always something to strive for. For it to be an "environmental nightmare", it has to be worse than what we’re already doing. So, no, a couple of articles complaining about lithium mining is not equivalent to evidence that this is worse for the environment than mining coal and oil, or other things you might want to mine instead of lithium. Nickel and cobalt are more of a problem than lithium according to my understanding, but we have some nickel-free and cobalt-free battery chemistries that are becoming more common, like LFP batteries. > We will keep doing it for as long as it remains cheaper to extract than to recycle, which is why we don't recycle. It's the reason we don't recycle that vast majority of what you put into the recycle bin. This is a misunderstanding of the economics, then. The batteries involved are huge, so it is very hard to “lose” these lithium-rich containers. These are not small coke cans which could easily end up in a landfill. But even then, more than 50% of the aluminum in coke cans is made from recycled aluminum. Recycling giant lithium ion batteries should be very profitable for everyone involved compared to mining new lithium. Plastic recycling is unfortunately a bad joke, of course.