Hopefully Google doesn't tell us to collectively throw them into the ocean and recharge the electric eels. [0] While cylindrical 18650's can be opened and unrolled carefully without being shorted, it's difficulty to quickly and reliably do at scale. Many other designs like flat-packs used in phones are too difficult to extract the lithium from, where the rarer metals like cobalt are the target components instead. [1] Extracting lithium isn't cost-effective due to its abundance in the earth.

[0] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39540/google-tells-search-user...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling#Lithium_ion_...