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Comment by yuan43 | Hacker News Reader

> Lithium is the lightest of all metals. Soft and malleable with a high capacity to store energy, it is ideal material to make lightweight, rechargeable batteries. Demand for the metal for lithium-ion batteries to power mobile devices has risen strongly for three decades. But while mobile-phone batteries require just a tenth of an ounce of lithium carbonate, a typical electric-car battery requires 130 pounds — around 20,000 times as much.

Without a radical breakthrough in batteries, electric cars are not the answer. They are every bit the problem that ICE cars are, it's just that the full environmental costs of the switchover have not been widely-recognized.

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> They are every bit the problem that ICE cars are, it's just that the full environmental costs of the switchover have not been widely-recognized.

I think you’re confusing an environmental catastrophe with devastating consequences for specific people (and animals etc) in a contained location with a completely uncontained environmental catastrophe with devastating consequences for all life on this planet.

Just reducing cars’ impact to “devastating a number of specific contained locales” would be a monumental step forward.

The funny thing about devastating a local population of flora/fauna is that it has wide ranging ripples that we are often unable to anticipate.

Saving the world by consuming more (vehicles, electronics) etc is not going to work. Eventually we will fall inline with the Nash Equilibrium as well.

What if cutting the rainforest down and killing all the whales stopped climate change? It's "just localized" so it will benefit us all in the long run. Let's replace ICE engines with something responsible and feasible. Hydrogen fuel cells can't be ruled out, there is still ground to be gained.

Having worked in a fuel cell lab, and remembering when the gas companies were toting fuel cell's as the red herring back in the aughts I find it very funny that we're still holding off on electrifying cars for the hope that fuel cells might finally start to be even remotely useful for personal transport.

If you want to make an argument at the grid scale, go ahead, but hydrogen's just too big a pain in the butt to work with.

If I were king we’d go to methane and overbuild solar to get there. But I’m not king (yet.)

If that would have stopped climate change it would have been done decades ago. Cutting down rainforests and hunting animals to extinction is something we've been doing for a very long time.

Mines will open as demand goes up. No shortage of lithium whatsoever. No technical breakthrough needed. The batteries we have today are good enough. There is plenty of opportunity to mine cleaner and more responsibly, but that's just a policy issue. Not insurmountable.

Do you know the impact of mines ?

Do you think they use lemon juice and electric excavators ? No, they go though thousands and thousands of tonnes of dirt to get grams of valuable metal while pumping shit tonnes of chemicals in the ground. All the byproducts are then stored in tailing dams which have the annoying tendency to leak or straight up break

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailings_dam

There are two options - don't mine, or mine responsibly. One of those options isn't realistic, so it's really only one option.

It's also the primary concern of the linked article, 'lax regulation', not necessarily mining itself.

> typical electric-car battery requires 130 pounds

Are these batteries recyclable in perpetuity or does lithium degrade?

... It's an element? Do you mean are there losses/leaks in the recycle/process/usage loop?

Depending on chemistry, it could be that pulling the elemental lithium back out of battery chemistry could be costly, energy intensive, or polluting.

Redwood Materials is currently recycling lithium batteries and getting a return rate above 80% on lithium and over 95% on nickel, cobalt and copper. Their processses, even at this very small scale, are less costly and less energy intensive than raw materials mining. And of course far less destructive to ecosystems.

And this is early days. These are already fantastic numbers but it is highly probable that innovation and scaling will improve them still further.

It's particularly exciting to see rare metals like cobalt so highly recyclable. As newer batteries require much less cobalt than older batteries, the need for virgin cobalt mining could be slashed or eliminated within a decade or two.

Neat! 20% loss is still pretty significant, but here's hoping they improve over time.

It's interesting to note that the lead acid batteries in ICE cars are among the most (possibly the most) fully recycled products. A large percentage of them make their way back to recyclers at end-of-life and when they do, they are fairly highly recyclable. New lead acid batteries are made of up to 80% recycled material.

Glass and aluminium are also extremely recyclable, but a huge amount of post-consumer glass and aluminium still ends up in landfill. Whereas the logistics, economics and supply chain of lead acid batteries makes them ideal for recycling. And I'd expect EV batteries to comfortably surpass this high bar given how difficult it would be for an EV battery to somehow make it into landfill.

I mean, petrol is almost all carbon (an element), but you don't get to capture it from the exhaust and reuse the damned thing.

Let me reword that for you... how practical/sustainable is it to recycle lithium car batteries? Will there be a point where we can stop all lithium mining because there will be enough in in use and available for recycling?

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