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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

This may be a silly question, but can't the lithium be recharged and reused? Or it's discarded and useless after a battery is tossed? Why mine more?

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Scale issue.

Example: My 15" 2017 laptop has a <80Wh battery. A Nissan Leaf has around 24000Wh battery (between 24k and 40k depending on model).

A Nissan Leaf battery is on the smaller side of what many believe is required for a mass adoption EV, yet still around 300 times larger. A small Tesla Model 3 is around 50 kWh[1], over 600 times larger. A large one at 75 kWh[1], over 900 times.

Here's an interesting infographic on Lithium-based batteries: https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials-tesla...

For old EV batteries it will be viable to reclaim metals, but regular consumer electronics waste is not enough to meet EV production.

[1] https://electrek.co/2017/08/08/tesla-model-3-battery-packs-5...

> For old EV batteries it will be viable to reclaim metals, but regular consumer electronics waste is not enough to meet EV production.

So it's a temporary problem that will go away once old EV batteries are coming in?

I wouldn't use those words (temporary problem) since I think we should be better at recycling batteries already, but yes - once the amount increases, so does economic incentive to build recovery facilities. Tesla has said they plan to do it.

Typically when a lithium-ion battery is recycled some metal parts are extracted (the battery contains metal plates which are relatively easily separated), but the lithium usually is not as it’s a lot more complicated to extract. Economically it is a lot cheaper just to mine new lithium, so proper recycling facilities don’t often exist.

In the U.K. lithium-ion batteries are usually discarded in a landfill, and often treated as hazardous waste:

https://app.croneri.co.uk/feature-articles/dealing-waste-lit...

That's what I was getting at. The world is running out of fresh lithium and meanwhile this used lithium is polluting landfills. Crazy!!

feels like such a waste.. would it be possible to design lithium-ion batteries in a way that's easier/cheaper to recycle?

Yes. Tesla's standardization on one or two cell types allows them to build specialized machines that can efficiently and quickly disassemble and recycle the components of the cell. (EDIT: That's the idea Musk presented, at least. I do know Tesla has done some battery recycling, but I don't know if they've implemented this method at scale, yet.)

Yes, lithium can be and is recycled.

But mining is even cheaper because lithium is actually abundant.

There's a growing grass roots DIY Powerwall movement, where people are recycling lithium batteries from laptops etc and turning them into huge battery packs for their homes: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-diy-hobbyis...

Because greater numbers of devices and batteries are required.

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