Not using current technology. You can't recycle lithium (for example) using smelting. It's also not very profitable.
It's still very much an unsolved problem.
I would love to be proved wrong!
Edit: I don't know why this is being downvoted. Using current recycling methods, the lithium is not recyclable (the cobalt is). I then asked if I am not correct, to please correct me.
So if not recycled, what's currently happening to lithium batteries in all our electronics and car batteries (etc)? Is it just handled as hazardous waste?
The real issue is that, just as you hint, it’s actually cheaper to get lithium from mineral rich dirt, than to set up collection, disassembly and recovery operation for existing batteries. We can do it, it’s just not most economically efficient way to get raw lithium. If lithium goes up in price, it might become viable.
Can you point me to a recycling facility that's doing this?
OK, question answered.
> As mentioned above, you've been fooled by the name of the technology and are looking at the wrong part of the periodic table.
I asked about lithium recycling. How am I being fooled?
(Though I threw that last one in deliberately: we're pulling P out of rocks and throwing it into the biosphere at an unsustainable rate right now, and are going to have to radically adjust the way we do agriculture fertilization in the coming decades. But even then there's going to be plenty of P around, we just have to change the sources we use to extract it.)
> Unlike petroleum, batteries are almost 100% recyclable.
Although they can be, they're not.
That's a big point in electric cars, that I think gets swept under the rug in the green-washing of electric cars: the main widget that makes electric cars electric cars is discarded as hazardous waste.
It's too costly and impractical to recycle them. We essentially want to replace a billion gasoline cars with electric ones, and the tech. to recycle those future billion batteries doesn't really exist.
Just a point I wanted to be cleared up.
FWIW, though: Li isn't particularly hazardous.
But I disagree that recycling is a big point regarding solar panels and batteries.
IMO lack of recycling and toxic waste are very lame and ignorant and misleading excuses (by the main stream media) to refuse the solar power industry, the battery industry and the electric car industry.
The threat and harm of climate change is catastrophic and very real and change is very urgent.
The fight against climate change must not be a debate of wrong priorities (waste vs climate change) and short term profitability of companies.
No foolish austerity and no local (and needless) poisoning by solar panels and batteries is worth the harm of climate change.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2017/0...
https://truthout.org/articles/release-of-arctic-methane-may-...
http://www.climate-change-emergency-medical-response.org/2-d...
http://globalwarming.berrens.nl/globalwarming.htm
For more links:
You're still missing the whole point, which is why you are being downvoted. The technology to recycle the future billion batteries exists today, and will improve in future. The issue here is that at a current price point it is simply not competitive compared to extracting raw lithium from ground. As the most accessible and profitable fields run out of the material, and as the demand for lithium grows, the price will go up, which might make the battery recycling economically viable.
Compare it to our current wood usage: the wood we use for furniture production is usually recyclable. You could take a wardrobe, disassemble it, and after some recutting and sanding you might use the wood for some other project. However, doing this in the end costs much more than using new materials, because collecting used furniture for recycling purposes, and labor needed to disassemble it and prepare wood for reuse is simply too much for it to be worth it, especially as it cannot be manufactured in a process as automated as making plywood, MDF, 2x4s or hardwood flooring is these days. Same with getting lithium from batteries: we could do it, but you'd have to pay extra for it.
Not really there yet, but it's ultimately a very solvable problem: the elements are right there and in high concentrations.
Lithium is not a limiting resource for battery production, it's actually fairly common in the earth's crust. The limit is cobalt[1].
Extracting cobalt from a junked battery is orders of magnitude cheaper than mining and smelting it from the (very diffuse) ores that are available.
[1] Also, per the article, nickel, which surprises me so much that I suspect it's wrong. Per wikipedia nickel reserves are 30x yearly production, and of course new exploration and extraction techniques are always pushing the reserve number up.
Reuse rate is only 68%.
That's a 32% reduction in stock per generation.
High rates of recycling are possible in theory, yes, but have not been demonstrated in practice. The loss rate over n generations for a recovery rate r (percent/100) is r^n. At a 90% recovery rate, you've lost 50% of initial stock in 7 generations.
https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/recycle/
https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/recycle/my...
[1] Though in a handful of cases it gets dispersed in a way that's very difficult to recover. I mentioned phosphorus in another post: P is being unsustainably pulled out of rocks and put into biomass, where it gets flushed into the oceans. Figuring out a way to get it back out is a far bigger mess than mere cobalt recycling is going to be. But even there economics will save us as fertilizer costs make recovery new techniques worthwhile.
As cheaper sources are exhausted, the more expensive ones become viable. So we won't run out on the projected time horizon.
The main reason why US and Australian rare earth production has gone away is because Chinese sources are so much cheaper (aka no pollution or safety regs). No production, no exploration, and no development of rare earth sources.
As cheap production goes away, people again look for, build, and use other sources.
Planning on a backup plan and providing large numbers of jobs through factories to increase the value of labor in these places is a much better way to increase the standard of living other without installing socialist governments.
Other countries with large resource extraction industries, such as Chile and Norway, have been able to take advantage of the profits to build their economy, thanks to their political stability. The resource curse can clearly be lifted by a suitably durable politics.