Old electric cars are a raw material of the future

Matter cannot be created nor destroyed. And elemental conversion is a big deal - usually involving nuclear fission or fusion.

Batteries do become depleted but the lithium never disappears, I guess simply put a reverse potential is no longer able to reverse the battery equation back to the energy storing state. Presumably because there is some third reservoir state that a potential cannot reverse (without delving into the chemistry).

Don't be mistaken into thinking that because a charger cannot reverse the battery reaction that the lithium itself is gone, or that there does not exist some completely unrelated process that can recover the lithium - separate from the immediate battery ecosystem

Lithium is lithium. Idk anything about lithium batteries, but presuming they use some kind if lithium salt compound or something, it's going to be a hell of a lot easier to re-saltify it or otherwise rebuild the useful compound, than it is to try and recreate big bang conditions to make more lithium.

Lithium is an element how can it be deleted?

If Lithium is chemically changed what prevents it being chemically changed back?

Batteries are sealed, if material does not leave than all the components used to make it are still inside the battery.

Outside of nuclear reactions, elements are not created or destroyed.

What happens in old batteries is the physical structure of the lithium metal is damaged so it does not function as well as a battery, but you can separate out the lithium from the old battery, melt it down and reform it into a new battery (or whatever else you want to do with lithium.)

Close, the typical problem is that the cation of the lithium compound used in the cathode (LiFePO4, LiCoO2, etc) becomes oxidized or otherwise degraded in a way that the electrochemical reaction can't reverse. In an LiFePO4 battery, you might get some iron oxide. In a traditional lead and sulfuric acid battery, you get lead sulfate crystals. There's typically the exact same amount of lithium present (it doesn't become gaseous and float away) but its constituent elements are unavailable for electrochem.

The atoms never leave the battery. There is no exhaust. It just works less well because it crystalizes in the wrong form. Which is a process that is trivially reversed.

As others have said, matter doesn't change.

As I understand it, lithium crystals form inside the battery and eventually short the battery out.

The lithium moves between the anode and cathode to release/store energy. I think when it's locked up in a crystal it isn't free to move and reduces the battery capacity as well.

That would only be the case if the batteries were nuclear.

Your comment has some nuggets of truth in it.

Ten year ago brines were about all of lithium supply, but now they're about half. The byproducts of lithium extraction from brine are profitable, but not enough to make a big difference to the bottom line of the mining operation.

https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-lithium.pd... from https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/lithium-statistics-and-inf... says that it's about half and half brines and hard-rock mining at this point. Even the expansion in Australia, which is indeed huge, only brings Australia to less than half of the world's lithium supply (40 kilotonnes out of 82 kilotonnes in 02020). All mining outside Australia is from subsurface brines except for one mine in China.

2% is "miraculously high" if subsurface brines are your reference point, because they're usually around 0.05% and almost never as high as 0.2%. It's an orders-of-magnitude difference.

Lithium costs on the order of US$10k per tonne. Potash is about US$800, boron around US$400, and magnesium around US$2000. All of these are mostly extracted from brines.

How does an amateur safely do this? I’ve never heard much about amateur chemists…

It actually is that many vehicles don't have a steel chassis. The Model Y for instance has an aluminum chassis to save weight. There even other materials such as Carbon Fiber used in some high end vehicle.

> yes, catalytic convertors and old computers contain trace elements like platinum (maybe $2 per catalytic convertor) but extracting it is far too expensive.

Catalytic converters can be worth $100s as scrap. They’re regularly stolen from parked cars.

You are agreeing with the OP, you know. "somehow prevented" = we put dumb regulations in the way or the entire process of lithium extraction can't be made profitable.

You're arguing past one another. The parent's working assumption is that concentrated lithium is much cheaper to harvest than trace lithium in natural deposits.

You seem to be assuming that it is cheaper to mine trace minerals than harvest from existing batteries.

Absent any domain knowledge regarding the cost of these two sources of lithium, neither of you can presume to be correct.

The only fundamental thing here is that, absent any external pressure, in a capitalistic system, we will see suppliers of lithium prefer the source that is cheaper for them to utilize.

Yes, in many cases polluting is profitable because the economy doesn't internalize the negative externality of pollution (and Coase's Theorem fails to hold for various reasons). That's part of what I meant by "There are problems that capitalism makes worse."

This is not one of those cases, precisely because (refining from) new raw materials is not cheaper than recycling waste.

If you count body as a part, then yes.

Actually your sandwich is made from poop.

The poop fertilized plants, the plants were harvested, some of them were turned into bread, others fed a pig, and that's what you're eating. Some of the poop decayed and was released as gases into the air, which were then recaptured by the plants, by bacteria in the roots of soybeans, and by Haber-Bosch factories (confusingly also called plants) which made synthetic fertilizer to fertilize the plants further.

You are recycling your sandwich, made from poop, into more poop.

This is the reflection on the disgusting nature of food and its link to the interdependent arising of all things. Your existence is inextricably linked to the existence of the pig and the poop. They are not separate processes; they are different focuses in the same process.

> That sandwich you're eating? Made from old recycled half eaten sandwiches.

For reference, that’s a Futurama quote.

Recycling of old cars is already pretty well developed. You drain the old fluids and strip any parts with secondary market value, then compact the whole thing and tip it whole into a steel melting furnace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQHKUpwMboY

There’s an argument for doing roughly the recycling sorting we do now and then just burying it.

>People don’t realise this when they think of landfill.

I expect you'll see increasing mining of tailings piles as things like gold extraction technology improves.

When we extract ore from a given area, it's mixed with just a few different compounds. So you tailor various acids and processes to economically filter out just want you need. How do you plan to do this when you have every compound we've ever created with overlapping solubilities and you want pure output?

In the post fossil fuel age, the waste stream will be a valuable source of reduced carbon for use in polymers and chemicals, and perhaps in specialized applications where chemical fuels are still needed (like long distance aircraft).