Study: Recycled Lithium Batteries as Good as Newly Mined
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
In 2031, it should be possible to by a long-past-warranty 2021 EV, replace the battery pack (with one made from recycled EV batteries!), and have it just-work. Just like you can replace the engine of a classic car today if you are so inclined.
It should be possible because the electrical connection of the batteries to EV drivetrains are relatively simple - although I'm sure that will take a lawsuit (like was launched against Nespresso to allow 3rd party coffee pods) for EV manufacturers to release the specs required for this to happen.
It would be unfortunate if EV batteries were non-serviceable except by the manufacturer after they were out of warranty, like phones are today. Instead, battery replacement would potentially allow the tertiary used EV market to flourish, and make them more accessible to people of modest means.
While this could be true, I certainly wouldn't assume it to be so. I dunno how integrated the battery pack is to the system - when you press the gas, does the car do things like draw more from some cells and less from others based on their degradation and capacity? Certainly on the charge side of the system it's very integrated, with the charge curve changing as individual cells (or at least modules) age/degrade.
As far as the motor controller is concerned, the battery might as well just be a single cell. If you change to a different kind of battery, you might need to change some of the motor controller's parameters (like maximum current limit) if those were designed around the limits of the old battery.
edit to add: when it comes to the charger and BMS, that stuff might or might not have to be replaced depending on the extent to which it can be made to work with a different configuration. And just like replacing an engine in a modern gas-powered car, there's probably a host of sensors that will trigger a whole host of warnings if they aren't reconnected to equivalent new sensors or spoofed in some way.
Basically the only way for car manufacturers to make this interface hard to replicate with third-party packs is by introducting some kind of DRM-like signatures on the messages from the BMS.
If you look at some recent photos [1] of the Tesla Berlin tour, the "structural battery pack" is still a bolt-in part of the car - it just carries some of the loads and has the seats bolted to it. If it's a standardized design, eg used for multiple model years, it should be a fairly standard replacement part in another decade or so. And the more efficient structural will reduce steel consumption by thousands of tonnes per year and reduce curb weight and increase mileage. Win-win-win for the environment.
I'm an optimist.
[1] https://electrek.co/2021/10/10/tesla-unveils-new-structural-...
Structural packs are nothing new, even cars like the iPace have structural packs and so do many. Hell even the Model S was structural and that had a swapable battery. Tesla or BYD structural packs are no different.
The actual innovation when people talk about 'structural packs' nowdays is that the cell themselves are part of the structure. However, this has nothing to do with how the pack is connected to the car.
Sadly the discussion on these topic gets totally confused by people endlessly repeating the same myths without understanding what they are talking about.
Just don't get into a car crash without the pack inside.
How this works is usually you would replace/fix individual parts of the engine until it works again. When you buy one ready to swap in, it's because a third party has taken the time to fix up an old engine - usually with no help from the original manufacturer.
A lot of car parts you cannot buy new replacements for. Engine parts you usually can, as pretty much everything there is consumable, but I mean things like body panels or interior parts. However a lot of cars end up damaged beyond repair, which means there are usually enough parts in the surrogate market so old cars can be kept running.
In this case it's not reasonable to ask manufacturers to be selling new battery packs 10 years after discontinuing that model, but they should make sure it's possible for third parties to make/remake them and have them behave the same as an OEM battery pack.
Unfortunately battery packs are very vehicle-specific. Hopefully we'll eventually see some standardized form factors so you can just install a generic battery. Until then, 3rd parties will have to make a different battery pack for each model they want to support. Most of the problem is just the physical dimensions and shape of the pack, but also there are a bunch of electrical connections, battery-management system (BMS) integration, coolant hoses, and so on that would vary from one vehicle to the next.
Hopefully as the technology matures, batteries get physically smaller and lighter, and therefore easier to shoehorn into weird spaces.
There's little the non-Tesla automakers are doing to stop you. They aren't helping you, but they aren't stopping you. The biggest problem is there's basically no market for it right now. I used to build stuff for this market (more-or-less). Only a tiny fraction of vehicles need anything. It's far cheaper to sell your vehicle to someone who doesn't mind 70 miles range and buy a new one with all the scale advantages of mass manufacturing than paying for the shop labor ($100-300/hr) and amortized cost of a battery few people want.
The classic environmentalist solution is to live a smaller life, with fewer things. That is a hard sell and runs counter to innate human instinct to gather resources. On the other hand, economic policy can’t seem to move past fighting symptoms, and does its very best to pretend the growth model isn’t the root cause of all environmental problems. Does anyone have a handle on a real and pragmatic solution I wonder?
This means society may tend to fall back to authoritarian systems like feudalism, when put under increasing external pressure.
The struggles and lack of coordination caused by this failure to act as a collective with modern technology present will lead to a fast and indiscriminate decline of the worlds population, I think.
This is an odd straw man to bring out, when the goal is very explicitly to reduce carbon output. Also nothing so far implies that the legislation is impossible to fix once the electric fleet exists.
Approaching ten years of life, most of these cars have lost <10% battery life (and loss is fairly linear in lithium) so in 20 more years we'll have cars with 70% of their original battery life. They'll still be perfectly usable for many people. So long as fossil-fueled vehicles are in use, let's get more EVs on the road instead of upgrading the ones we have.
Cars should be a different story but we'll have to fight for that even.
Battery packs are structural components for safety reasons more than anything. Weight and volume savings are secondary to safety in regards to anything with high energy density, be it a battery pack, fuel cell, or gas tank.
But though they _contain_ batteries, a battery pack is not a battery any more than a car is an engine. The battery inside the battery pack remains non-structural and non-load-bearing.
The individual cylinders are made from steel. The steel is used structurally. Perhaps next you'll tell me the "battery" is actually just the anode, cathode and electrolyte?
Thank you.
> Perhaps next you'll tell me the "battery" is actually just the anode, cathode and electrolyte?
No, next I'll tell you that this isn't Reddit and you don't have to be a dick to "win an argument on the internet". On HN you can simply point out the facts, like you did above.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chinas...
That doesn't mean it wouldn't work today, but probably a harder problem than it looks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4nS_tSQiVQ
There is quite a big commercial opportunity, I expect the sector will grow alongside the growth and ageing of EV's.
Because an engine change on a modern ICE car is far from easy. In major part because of the same bullshit with electronics incompatibility caused by manufacturers.
Wrong serial numbers on injectors/ECU/sensors? Welp, fuck you, buy compatible original parts or swap the whole engine, every little wire and all.
It's like needing to swap the battery+controller+motors on an EV.
Then again, government regulations play a part here, at least in Europe. Can't just have you riding around in your now "custom" car.
They're apparently expanding into more countries. I really like the concept of these things. It should be possible to make drivein charging stations for cars that do the same. But obviously you wouldn't be able to do that manually and designing such a system is a lot more expensive.
I've been thinking of a similar solution for e-bikes and electric scooters (like Bird and Lime for example). Swapping a battery would be SO MUCH BETTER than having to fully recharge your own battery.
If I had to make a prediction for 50 years in the future, I'd guess that Tesla and others would study a way to hot-swap batteries in the car at the "e-Station" in a couple minutes instead of waiting for your own battery to recharge.
https://www.e-scooter.co/vinfast-klara/
in Vietnam is just one example.
"This will make the upfront cost of the electrical 2 wheeler (2W) and 3 wheelers (3W) to be lower than ICE 2 "
https://www.livemint.com/auto-news/indian-govt-to-allow-regi...
Instead of assuming we have endless resources we should design all products to recyclable from the start design phase. This is to lessen global warming and environmental impact.
Properly designed items should be easier, cheaper and quicker to recycle than to start with a mining step. One of the important bits here is now the various materials are joined, specifically, gluing is a barrier to recycling, as are various surface coatings. This is where I think we could make a very quick step in the right direction by designing not just for manufacturing costs but also for the cost of breaking the produced item up into its constituent elements.
Penalties for the fraction that can not be reliable returned to its pre-manufacture state, as well as an automatic obligation to take back and recycle any product produced.
The difference is whether the state will be allowed to profit from its own resources, or is the nation under the thumb of a more militarily powerful nation and there exploited by foreign capital. We let Norway exploit its resources its own way, in other nations we have interfered mightily to better our own interests at the expense of the populations of the nation that owns the oil resource.
Like if you buy natural gas from a responsibly run source that does a good job and has low emissions and I buy it from some terrible company that does a shite job, do we pay the same tax per unit of gas consumed?
For example, with carbon taxes on gasoline, we can calculate what the average person consumes in terms of gasoline per year, and then calculate the outliers (people with super-efficient cars and people with gas guzzlers). Then, we establish some reasonable maximum that we think we can get away with surcharging the guzzlers, and establish a gradient. The average person is given back a tax break that corresponds to the surcharge they'll pay at the pump, so it's a wash for them; the guzzler gets the tax break too but ends up paying more, incentivizing everyone to be the efficient driver who basically gets a bonus.
I think you could do the same for any kind of tax; establish the baseline for resource consumption efficiency for a particular recyclable commodity (and it will have to be per-commodity to make any sense at all); set up the incentive gradient so that companies producing more-recyclable-than-average goods end up getting free cash for doing so, hopefully offsetting the other costs associated with this, and companies producing things that are harder or impossible to recycle end up paying more.
The end result is that the product for the consumer that is more recyclable should end up making more financial sense. Instead of pinning the gradient the way you do for gas (literally, 'what they can get away with and still get elected'), you'd pin it at a level where it incentivizes companies themselves to be purchasing recycled materials instead of new ones.
All of the above is predicated on the material in question being able to be recycled without requiring more energy input / producing a higher carbon footprint to recycle than acquiring the original raw product is. There are some materials that it's just not worth to recycle, most of the time; plastic is definitely on that side for now, like it or not.
I feel like so much could be fixed by just making things cost their true price.
I'm not trying to shit on the idea because I think we genuinely need to do something but I can't come up with any rational way to calculate the true cost of limited resources.
At the same, I don't think doing nothing at all a good alternative. If anything I don't even think this is the biggest obstacle. That's probably the fact that literally no country in the world wants to volunteer to put themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
I think that it has been established that the cost of packaging is smaller than the marginal increase in profits from greater sales (from the perspective of the manufacturers and retailers).
In theory, an AR-heavy economy could displace packaging costs with AR facsimiles overlaid on generic (even standardized) packaging, but I don't think that would be a win, energy-wise.
One of the comments made was that consumers assume recycling works as a kind of magical "Get out of Pollution Free" card. In reality, the system we have only works if there are companies that want to actually use the recycled materials. If there are none, it just gets landfilled.
I bring this up because one of the things mentioned was Pringles cans. Everyone thinks they are recyclable. But the can is two sheets of cardboard glued over a thin sheet of aluminum. The paper companies don't want the cans because they don't want to somehow deglue the cardboard from the aluminum (time and cost expensive to process), and ditto for the aluminum people. So the cans just get thrown out.
In fact some people make arguments that recycling programs do more harm than good, because they allow consumers to alleviate their guilt about waste without actually helping the environment. The cynic may say that's intentional.
I'd have expected that simply melting down the stuff would burn off all the organic contaminants (paper/plastic/glue and food residue), leaving the aluminium and sludge that can be scooped off.
Of course you need a purification step after dealing with scrap, but aluminum scrap, even when contaminated is quite valuable, basically the price is a function of how pure it already is.
This might not be suitable for a Pringles can, but at least suitable for glass containers and bottles.
Coca-Cola bottles had their originating bottling plant stamped into the bottom.
It still is in India (at least sometimes). I suspect rising labour costs killed this industry, though. Why take on a logistical challenge you don't have to?
A plastic soft-drink bottle https://www.polisanhellas.com/products-pet-preform.html is about 30 grams of extremely chemically inert material, produced for a tiny energy cost from about 30 grams of crude oil, that goes to a landfill and stays there for, probably, millennia. So a single barrel of oil makes about 5,000 plastic bottles. Each bottle embodies about 1200 kJ of energy from oil that would otherwise have been burned. So whatever the externalized costs of drilling, refining, and shipping a barrel of oil are, it's about a five-thousandth of that. If you incinerate the bottle in the end, you get that saved-up energy back, at the risk of producing pollution from other things in the furnace.
Of course, blow-molding the bottle takes energy; you have to heat those 30 g of plastic up to 125°, but that only takes about another 4.5 kJ per bottle. Another similar amount was spent to injection-mold the preform. The actual work of blowing is even less, under 0.1 kJ. Similarly for shipping, molding machine operation, machine maintenance, catalysts, and so on.
(A potential hole in this analysis is that I don't really know the energy costs of the whole terephthalic acid synthesis and polymerization process. They can't be enormously higher than the cost of molding, but they might be a lot lower or a little higher.)
Contrast that with washing a glass bottle. You can't really wash a 500-mℓ glass bottle with less than about a liter of water, and to sterilize it you need that water to be at least 60°, preferably more like 90°. Heating water from 25° to 60° takes 35 calories per gram; at 4.2 J/cal, that's 150 kJ.
(I think in actual fact the energy to reuse a glass bottle is about an order of magnitude higher than this.)
You also have to take into account the energy to make the glass bottle: you're heating 500 grams of raw materials (or maybe cullet) up past, typically, 1200°, which takes maybe 700 kJ, depending on the materials' specific heats and enthalpies of fusion. This gets amortized over the number of reuses of the bottle.
What about disposal? Proper disposal of a 500-gram glass bottle uses 15 times as much landfill space as a 30-gram plastic bottle (just as it costs 15 times as much to ship) but in any case there is no shortage of landfill space, and neither type of bottle occupies an appreciable percentage of existing landfills. Improper disposal for glass bottles is much worse, as you know if you've ever stepped on a broken glass bottle underwater at the beach. Chemically, both materials are very inert and nontoxic. (Microplastics are almost entirely from washing synthetic fibers, not from plastic bottles.)
So, making a plastic bottle takes on the order of 10 kJ of energy, while washing a glass bottle for reuse takes more like 150 kJ, and similarly shipping glass around externalizes 15× as much of each cost. Neither one has significant disposal externalities, except in the rare case of improper disposal, in which case broken glass is dangerous.
The crucial question, then, is how you weight the raw-material extraction externalities for the plastic bottle, and whether you incinerate it; because if drilling, refining, and shipping oil is the most significant externality (oil spills, bribing Nigerian officials, arresting Native American protestors asserting a sovereign right to block the Keystone pipeline, US invasions of Iraq), then the plastic bottle is about 7× worse. Unless you incinerate it instead of burying it in a landfill, in which case suddenly its oil consumption drops to zero, making it much better again. On the other hand, if the most significant externality is something related to burning oil or other fuels, like global warming, washing the glass bottle is 15× worse than throwing it out and replacing it with a plastic bottle. Unless your hot-water heater is solar or geothermal. Then again, you can run a blow-molding plant on solar energy, too.
(There are other questions of pollution; both glassmaking and PET-making can produce pollution, but it's not intrinsic to either process, so which process produces more pollution is largely a matter of how mismanaged it is. However, by virtue of dealing with 15× larger quantities of material, glassmaking is at a disadvantage here.)
Is it? After a short time the glass is smoothed by the sand/sea/rock and is fairly low impact.
Of course there are natural sharp rocks, too, just like there's natural asbestos and natural hydrogen sulfide.
One quibble: > Proper disposal of a 500-gram glass bottle uses 15 times as much landfill space as a 30-gram plastic bottle (just as it costs 15 times as much to ship)
It only costs 15x as much to ship if weight is the driving factor in shipping. For a lot of surface shipping methods, dimensional measures govern the shipping prices either entirely or substantially. (No one is flying empty bottles as part of their supply chain.) It might be 2x as much, but it’s not going to be 15x if both pallets of bottles take up the same space.
Also glass is denser than PET, so 15 times as much mass is really only like 6 times as much volume in the landfill.
A tiny nitpick. I'm quite sure you can use that same liter of hot water to wash multiple bottles. And even then any facility that washes bottles at scale would use the leftover heat from waste water to heat the fresh water.
https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/282173/1-s2.0-S221282711...
So my point stands, we could see significant environmental improvements if we mandated standard glass bottle and container sizes.
Something like: Food, Carbonated Liquid, Beer, Wine.
Sizes: 150ml, 300ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1L, 1.5L, 2L.
Coarse shred
(duration???) Submerge within an artificial swamp rich in bacteria to digest the biological components; ideally capture the outputs from this loop for fuel or other bio processes.
When completed a rich 'ore' of mixed metal shavings should be the result, and easier to recycle.
So as nice as this idea sounds it is not really workable in practice.
The way it does work is indeed, shredding, then float tanks to separate the lighter materials from the heavier ones, then some more stepwise improvements (for instance: to separate out the steel from other metals) and finally compaction and what comes out the other end gets passed on to companies willing to pay for it, and if there is no market, which get paid to deal with the resulting sludge/scraps/goo.
Recycling is not nearly as orderly a process as manufacturing is, and there will always be a residue that simply can not be dealt with economically. Properly designed packaging takes that into account at the time of manufacture to ensure that the residue is as small a fraction as possible.
This is a hard problem, and in the longer term, next to climate change one of the hardest ones that we will need to tackle. The good news is that we could start today.
More realistically, there isn't really any risk of running out of landfill space for product packaging at anything similar to current consumption levels. If a person ate a 50-gram can of Pringles and a 30-gram bottle of Coke every day, they'd have 29 kg of packaging at the end of the year, or 29 liters, which compact down to a 40-cm-diameter sphere.
I used to periodically visit an ecovillage that handled their (much smaller than normal) packaging waste in this way: they would tamp it into two-liter Coke bottles with a piece of rebar as a tamper, and when the bottle was full, they would cap it, plaster it over with adobe, and use it as a construction brick. A 6 m × 18 m house with 300-mm-thick walls 3 m tall contains 43 m³ of wall volume which can be mostly filled with this kind of stuff: 150 person-junk-food-years of packaging.
8 billion people doing this would produce 23 million cubic meters of packaging per year, which sounds like a lot, but it's an 800-meter-diameter sphere. Lake Superior is 12000000 million cubic meters, so it would take those 8 billion people half a million years to fill it up with this packaging, if carefully weighted to keep it from floating, of course.
So, I don't think recycling packaging is a particularly bad problem. If by "in the longer term" you mean over the next hundred million years, I do agree that we'll need to solve it. But I don't think it's a particularly difficult problem at that timescale. For the next few million years, we have plenty of space to just store the stuff until recycling it is profitable.
Consumers were told that by the local authorities who put these recycling programs in place. They were not told that behind the scenes it all goes to the landfill anyway. If they knew the truth they might actually make more effort to reduce the amount of stuff they throw out and be more aware of wasteful packaging.
Shrinkage. It's to the point where you need a screwdriver to get a kid's toy car out of the box.
Obviously we should expect energy/material loss when recycling (meaning, each time something is recycled it should require inputs), but perhaps we can get those numbers down more and more as time goes on.
They make you separate plastics because in some areas they burn the plastics separately in ways that attempt to reduce the pollution from burning it.
I also watched that video, it's just so depressing. The amount of externalized costs we incur is simply staggering.
When I see someone throw something away, or when I throw something away myself, I just think: "Everything you've ever thrown away is somewhere."
So the default assumption is that if you do your job, the tax is more of a deposit. If you don't do your job, you, or rather your customers are still paying, and your customers can drive down the cost of your competitors by helping increase their tax offset if you make it a hassle to return things at yours.
By creating the presumption that you ought to be able to collect and recycle most of the recyclable products you sell (return rate for cans and bottles is well over 90%), the tax/deposit can be set fairly high. High enough and you create secondary businesses taking the hassle of returns for those who can't be bothered (don't want to return your bottle in Norway? odds are someone who needs the money will fish it out of the trash to collect the deposit), and there's a strong incentive for businesses to take back anything they sell subject to such taxes/deposits and deliver them to whichever scheme is approved to offset against their tax bill.
This sounds relatively close in principle to an implementation of what you're suggesting. with penalties etc. implemented basically by tallying up the tax per unit sold and then reducing the liability per unit recycled, so the penalty is simply the default if you fail to recycle.
The cost needs to be high enough to either get really high return rates and/or to cover the costs to society of undoing whatever damage is done by what is left.
Note that a key part is also that the most convenient option offered to comply needs to be to participate in recycling.
In Norway you hand bottles or cans in pretty much anywhere that sells them. Which means most people just bring them in next time they go to the grocery store.
If you require people to bring them to special recycling locations you should expect return rates to plummet.
Plastic recycling has pretty much been a multi-decade lie. Let's not bone ourselves with Lithium.
Who am I kidding, humans are great at boning themselves.
We really ought to be incinerating things at 3000C, but so far we haven't been able to engineer machines to do this without melting themselves...
A typical Lithium-Ion cell contains Aluminum, steel, possibly a protection circuit (fibreglass, electronics components), carbon, copper, an electrolyte with lithium in solution and quite probably other elements besides.
Right-to-repair friendly products would thus get an immediate advantage owing to their ease of disassembly.
In economics we talk about externalities, or costs tht are burdened by society but not the producer, making prices artificially low.
I would love to see some mechanism in place to make sure that firms bare the cost of externalities. In this case, maybe firms are required to fund the cost of recycling their products which would incentive them to reduce the cost of recycling.
Yes the cost of products will go up, but in a direct relationship to removing the cost to society and making sure products are properly priced.
I'm purposefully simplifying this because the actual methodology to make this happen is incredibly complicated.
If someone told me all this $3T extra spending in the US was to offset the costs of producing a more Circular Economy then I'd agree it would be a future generation's money well spent for good reasons.
This is BS. Modern separators are microns thin.
That seems like a waste of cobalt. I think modern cells are usually something more like NMC811 (80% nickel, 10% each of manganese and cobalt). You could use the cobalt from the old cells to make more than three times as many new cells, though you'd need a lot more nickel.
I'm hoping most mass-market EVs switch over to using lithium iron phosphate, which doesn't use nickel or cobalt. Supposedly there are some major LFP patents expiring soon; maybe that'll increase the number of factories outside of China producing them.
I am impressed so far with my new-to-me Chevy Bolt getting 4.5 mi/kWh and squeezing a respectable range (250 mi) out of a smallish battery (55 kWh).
But when BMW puts in an 88 kWh battery in their i4 but it only gets 2.3 mi/kWh, there's no way they could accept the lower power density of lithium iron phosphate batteries.
I think LFP is a good option for getting mass-produced EVs to the point where they're approximately cost-competitive with gas-powered cars. Energy density isn't amazing, but the materials they're made from are cheaper and more readily available, they're easier to recycle, they can last a very long time, and they're quite a bit safer.
I expect regular lithium ion will continue to be used in high-end vehicles until some battery technology comes along that's better and cheaper, or cobalt and nickel get so expensive that it's not worth the cost.
That's interesting that the BMW is that much less efficient than a Chevy Bolt. I wonder if that's due to aerodynamics, weight, drivetrain efficiency, or something else?
I agree that LFP ought to be usable, but only if automakers step up their efficiency to match.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/10/tesla-made-1-6-billion-...
I think my point still stands about non-Tesla automakers, who seem disinclined to optimize their vehicles for range. Tesla, with better aerodynamics and more efficient drivetrains, are well positioned to use LFP batteries. Combine that with their expertise in building safe, efficient battery packs, and they’ll be even further ahead of everyone else.
Living in a relatively cold climate (average January temperature in Boston, MA, USA is 22F [-6C]), I am a bit concerned about the reportedly worse cold performance of the batteries, but presumably they’ll manage that. One of their top markets is Norway after all.
Now if only they would just put some damn knobs in the car instead of that giant touchscreen…
BMW i4: 2,290 kg
The BMW would get a 350 mile (560km) range at 4 mi/kWh, which is clearly attainable.
FTA: A new study by Wang... The cathodes were made using a patented recycling technique that Battery Resourcers, a startup Wang co-founded, is now commercializing.
This needs to be a deposit-based program. E-recycle fee upfront at purchase, rebate at proper disposal.
On top of that all supermarkets in the UK have a battery return box where you can drop them off.
Good if true, of course. But really needs independent evaluation.
There is a lot of potential for re-use of battery packs, it will just take some time for the 3rd party industry to develop around it. Lots of use for these things for solar projects, especially.
My point being that actual chemical level recycling is really last resort.
We talk about recycling, I'm concerned that it's the same chatter as we had from the plastic companies in the 80-90s who invented the reduce reuse recycle slogan so that they could get away with selling more plastic, when its much cheaper to produce new plastic than recycle.
So the question is, is it cheaper to produced new batteries or recycle old ones?
I feel lithium is a transition material, until we have more sustainable battery tech.
----
EVs are still better than ICE cars, so don't take any EV problems as an excuse to keep producing ICE cars. E.g. even if the grid was entirely oil-powered, large plants burn oil more efficiently and cleanly than ICE, and keep emissions away from cities.
But cars as a form factor are still inherently inefficient for moving people. It doesn't matter if they're electric, taxis, or self-driving: compared to trains they have low road throughput, depend on tires with much higher rolling resistance, and particles from tire wear are another source of pollution.
With that said, many Teslas that are totaled have their batteries sold on the secondary market for classic car EV conversions and DIY home energy storage.
[0] https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/2020-tesla-impact-report.pdf
Recycled Material Lithium Batteries Just As Good
EVs have not yet achieved as much volume and settled on standards. But that will change. Probably quickly at current growth rates.
If the consumer became a supplier of raw recyclable materials, and those materials had value, they deserve to be compensated, and will probably be more engaged in the sorting and quality control processes. I drink a lot of beer - that makes me a great supplier of ready-made glass bottles to anyone that wants them. Rather than bulk collecting a random pile of potentially recyclable material, here's a bunch of sorted glass bottles each quarter. Anyone that can hook into that kind of idea and find some kind of economy of scale might make a killing.
I am sure there would be ways to do this but I guess somebody has to invest the money to figure out the process. And also to design things so they can be recycled easily.
If anything, recycling batteries is one of the most obviously beneficial things to do. Works for lead, and recycling aluminum cans was also cost effective (when you get rid of the cost of collecting the cans). Glass is also cost effective.