Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

18 days ago, I posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26952544, "This battery waste problem has an epistemological status similar to that of dowsing and witchcraft." This article seems to vindicate the viewpoint I expressed in the comments there: electric vehicle waste can only pose a significant pollution problem if capitalism is somehow prevented from profiting from it. (There are problems that capitalism makes worse, but this is the kind of problem that capitalism is good at solving.)

However, the reporters have acquired considerably more knowledge of the issues than I had.

At that point I looked a bit into the hydrometallurgical processes that were available, enough to convince myself that there were no showstopper problems that would make recycling battery waste uneconomical. But I didn't know about the pyrometallurgical processes at all, and I found that aspect of the article very interesting. Nor did I know about the current business situation.

> only pose a significant pollution problem if capitalism is somehow prevented from profiting from it.

This is fundamentally false.

The entire issue of environmental pollution exists because, or when, reuse isn't profitable.

If new raw materials are cheaper than reusing, then capitalism will absolutely result in dumping old materials and increasing pollution.

Why would you think otherwise?

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.

No, I'm disagreeing, you know.

What "dumb regulations" are you referring to specifically?

Tons of things aren't profitable even with zero regulations. That's my entire point -- not profitable even before any regulations.

Though regulations also exist for some pretty important reasons -- like prohibiting cheap child labor, requiring worker safety protections, etc.

On the contrary. There is a lack of regulations that properly price externalities and make the people profiting from them pay for the shit they pollute.

While this is true in general, in this case recycling the waste is more profitable than discarding it, even without regulations. Of course, you could still produce more pollution during the recycling process, a point touched on in the article.

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.

In my comment, I said, "At that point I looked a bit into the hydrometallurgical processes that were available, enough to convince myself that there were no showstopper problems that would make recycling battery waste uneconomical." That seems to be the "domain knowledge" you're referring to? So I didn't presume I was correct; I investigated and found out what was correct.

This article has much better domain knowledge than what I was able to dig up at the time, though.

I don't think we're arguing past one another at all. The central point of my comment was that people often made the error that crazygringo made; I explained why it was an error. Then, crazygringo responded, reiterating the error. I think my comment was rather precisely targeted at his comment, even though I made it earlier.

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.

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