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Comment by kfprt | Hacker News Reader

I don't know enough about battery chemistry specifically but I don't see how separating from a rich ore could be more expensive than a mined ore.

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Intuitively I agree, from a different angle although I don't know about chemistry either, but from a supply chain perspective, for generations it's all been about optimising delivery to a consumer. Supply lines point directly at households and beyond that point it's a bit of a dark web. Random piles of crap end up... somewhere?

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.

This concept exists in the American auto repair sector as core charges. I believe they work pretty well, but once the "core charge" becomes too insignificant then people will ignore it for the convenience. I suspect an organization as large as Apple could subsidize core charges for iPhone and laptop batteries.

It worked for the last starter I bought :-)

I remember selling bulk quantities of beer bottles back to the shop as recently as 2005. A state-mandated, industry-wide reuse scheme would lead to them being examined for damage, sterilised and supplied back to breweries. Theoretically the scheme still works, but somehow the beers I buy when visiting the home country all come in bottles not partaking in it.

I call this entropy. Once the products are dispersed it takes a lot of energy to bring them back together like they were in the supply chain. I'm not sure it will ever be solved purely because of the physics.

There could different pollutants when you recycle batteries than when you take ore.

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.

Metals are really easy to reclaim and the energy required to separate nearly pure metal from some minor contaminants is a lot lower than separating it from ore.

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.

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