- What communities do those minerals come from, and what ailments arise from the sequestration and disposal of them?
Preface: everything you do has an environmental cost, because you are a human, and on top a human living in a developed country (so I assume), understand this cost and understand that despite things having costs it is generally better to be environmentally conscious and take environmentally conscious routes than not doing it
Depends on what type of battery you are using, lead acid batteries such as cars are common and already produced at scale despite their environmental cost, because battery banks do not have weight limitations it is generally recommended to not use lithium for them and instead use other types of batteries for the task
Lithium batteries have different processing costs, if you are using lithium assume that the workers are being paid more or less fairly at market rates, if you are using lead, then your guess is as good as mine because of the sprawling production line, who knows what an iron miner in west papua earns/month, any product you ever buy will have human suffering embedded to it as a cost, any product, because suffering is inherent to both human existence and production of goods at competitive prices, that's how it is, deal with it
> What changes are happening to emergency services and fire now that we have a battery, similar to car or marine batteries, which are difficult to extinguish en masse?
No changes are happening, and you need to deal with that uncertainty, changes will start to happen when enough lithium based vehicles start setting themselves on fire and people dying that the system is forced to react and develop countermeasures, the world is ruled by institutional inertia, no changes will happen until that inertia is overcome by these new forces, which will happen eventually, only after enough accidents have happened and attention has been called to the issue
> How are these recycled? I dont mean, just ship it to X company for rebate, I mean what actually happens to the waste products and how are those neutralized?
Unknown. Lead acid batteries can be recycled, unknown if tightly packaged/glued lithium composites wrapped in plastics akin to tetrapak can be recycled, there are facilities which do it, they grind the batteries to dust for it tho, then reprocess what they can
But, the good thing is that unlike tetrapak recycling there's lots of money on the line for novel methods of lithium recycling
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/recycled-lithium-...
But yeah, overall it is a good outlook and it is developing fast vs current state of affairs with fossil fuels