i just fear it will be the same story as plastics: the industry tells us consumption is not a problem because the material is recyclable, but there is actually no economic incentive to recycle, so it is landfilled instead.
On the other hand, there’s so much oil flowing that we have periods where the biggest problem is finding where we can store it. Amounts of plastic needed for general consumer uses are often measured in pennies (or less) so there hasn’t been any drive to even consider recycling from the producer side.
But it’s also possible huge lithium deposits will be found that lower prices, or we’ll find a cheaper alternative battery that makes disposability a more obvious solution than recycling. But as another data point, lead acid car batteries are generally recycled. Lithium batteries are very different, but they’ll likely face similar motivations due to cost.
Lead acid batteries are easy to recycle because there is exactly one chemistry used in car batteries. LiIon is not yet as standard.
In the case of batteries we just want to pull out the elements, which are impossible to destroy by processing.
A problem with plastics is that it is hard to create high quality plastics from recycled materials. And there is only a limited demand for park benches made from low quality recycled plastics.
This is different with metals where you can "just" melt everything and separate the metals. This is probably less expensive than mining the materials in the first place where the ore contains a much lower share of the metals. Also a car contains a few hundred kilograms of recyclable materials and there is a very limited number of different models. So there is an economic incentive.
Also, destroying the landscape to "save the climate" still ends with destroying the environment. Wind and solar aren't energy dense enough to justify the damage they cause.
What species already inhabits that land or space that will be re-purposed?
What happens to old solar panels and wind turbines after they reach their end of life?
What happens to the places that supply the raw materials for solar panels?
How many batteries are needed to make up for solar and wind variance? What is required to make those batteries? How much land do they require?
Will batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines all continue to work at the same level as other power sources in times of extreme weather?
In the case of Norway, apparently they produce ~90% of their electricity from hydro. Good strategy if there’s lots of spots in your country for hydro electric dams, pretty difficult to replicate if not.
How would you separate the metals after melting them? My understanding is that you can extract some high valuable metals via different processes, but otherwise it's technologically and economically not feasible to separate molten metals.
These are actually two steps: Melt everything into the "Black Mass" and use Hydrometallurgy to extract the metals afterwards. I think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XylDkcrJgTw gives a good overview (although the voice is somewhat hard to listen to).
Yes, and if you have a bunch of small pieces of different metals all mixed together, you can very carefully melt one, extract it, then the next, etc by gradually raising the temperature.
But if you take an alloy, e.g. bronze, you're combining ~2 metals of different melting points (copper ~1100C, and tin ~230C) to get essentially a new metal with a usually-middling melting point (bronze ~920-970C). Raising bronze to ~300C will not melt the tin out for you to collect. It's not just a surface area issue either, chopping it up into many tiny pieces / a powder won't melt more out and give you something to collect. None will. It'll all melt at bronze's temperature, and until then it all remains solid.
Similarly, if you melt bronze and then cool it down a bit, the copper won't solidify on its own. The whole solution will solidify around 950C. It's kinda like how salty water solidifies at a lower temperature - it's not that the water is freezing at -1C but the salt is not, that'd be a slush (and wouldn't make much sense anyway, salt is solid at room temperature). The solution behaves as a new "whole".
If you want to separate two alloyed metals, you generally have to chemically bind some to something else so it comes out of solution in a way you can capture. Then you can skim it off / extract it from the bottom / etc. One less-visually-obvious strategy is to just keep the alloy hot and exposed to the air, so some of it oxidizes and comes out as slag - that's chemical separation using oxygen. It works pretty well for gold, because unlike many metals gold does not oxidize.
You can also sometimes let the metals separate themselves by density by just letting it sit while melted..... but you'll be fighting against any internal currents set up by temperature differences, so it's difficult, imprecise, and slow to do in practice. But for some combinations and equipment it's feasible.
Here's a related Quora discussion: https://www.quora.com/If-you-smelted-a-varied-mix-of-scrap-m...
I don't think you can say the same for batteries. There is valuable and scarce material contained in batteries, and it seems likely that someone will find a way to make it happen.
Companies like Redwood Materials have publicly said they are already profitable (cash flow positive) if you remove their R&D and money they're using to expand to meet demand.
At this point, any aggressive direction change from humanity has to be thought through well about environmental impact - of course no one has the incentive to do that and hence the gov has to pick it up.
EV is probably being justified as "loss leader" in terms of environmental impact - it has to be net bad for the environment right now, but eventually better for the environment. That's not good enough.
In general, these trends offer nice openings for new businesses to be a first-mover and grow quickly (these days, businesses are not even making profits in the short-term).
But EV batteries are much less spread out than cigarette butts. The waste is generated in predictable places like mechanics shops, and doesn't involve casual consumer decisions like whether to litter or recycle a pop bottle.
The people who sold the inputs to make fresh plastic didn't want you to believe that, because it would affect their sales.
The people making stuff with the plastic didnt want to pay for it if their competitors didn't, so they waited on a law.
Group number 1 stopped such a law in any country where people who sell the input for plastics have a lot of political power.
Unless the people who produce lithium become powerful enough to force people to give them money for no good reason, it'll get recycled.
A battery may loose 40% capacity. That's bad for a car, but perfectly fine for stationary electricity storage.
Also, EU has "End of Life Vehicles Directive" since 2000:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_Life_Vehicles_Directive
Core charges as you're describing them don't work for items the manufacturers can't economically recondition and therefore don't want back.