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Comment by zecg | Hacker News Reader

> The study said only about 5% of lithium-ion batteries are recycled, and by 2040, there could be some 8 million tons of lithium-ion battery waste.

That can't be true?

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The first bit is a well known factoid that gets quoted out of context.

Here's an article discussing it:

https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-net-zero-will-be-harde...

> It is a truth universally acknowledged that only 5% of lithium-ion batteries are recycled, with the rest going to landfill. This claim is, however, false. It has been traced back to a report written in 2011 by Friends of the Earth, which divided volumes of collection by volumes of manufacturing at the time.

Love the chain of sources: Business Insider article is about this paper

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49753-5

which for that factoid links to

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.1c02602

which for that just links to a BBC article with a doctor saying the "value everyone quotes is about"

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56574779

The 2011 part is what makes this outstanding, the iphone had been released only 4 years before; the majority of lithium ion we were using was likely laptop batteries and cell phones that lasted a week on a small battery.

If anything, i would expect that recycling would become more commonplace with the larger scale of EV batteries, Electric bicycle batteries, and power stations.

And the key part is, the advantage of lithium ion is that the same sized battery provies 10x as many charges (and more energy density) than its predecessors NIMH or NICD)

Example #4,928,422,857 of people's inability to think about rapidly changing quantities.

Today the vast majority of lithium-ion batteries come out of phones and laptops, and those are generally too small and annoyingly packaged to recycle economically.

Battery packs from cars are a different matter and there are already pilot projects that are recycling them. I think in the future these projects will grow as the economics become more favorable. They're basically just mining the materials out of an extremely rich deposit.

It's not something I've personally verified but I read a while back that a lot of EV batteries specifically before being recycled get upcycled in storage products for homes and power grids, where raw capacity isn't as important and better management and cooling than is possible in cars greatly mitigate further degradation.

Yes. This is the big reason the recycle rates are currently fairly low, there just isn't much to recycle yet thanks to the longevity of EVs and the relatively healthy secondary market.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/11/old-ev-batte...

I've been somewhat optimistic about decarbonization via electrification in the past few years. Despite the very vocal opponents online we have been installing increasing amounts of solar and wind generation each year, and EVs are getting up near the tops of sales charts. Battery storage is starting to ramp the way solar did and I'm hopeful that in a few years we will be seeing a serious reduction in CO2 emissions.

Already we are seeing industry pushback with astroturf campaigns complaining that the woke are stealing food from trees. That's how you know people are making a difference.

Most lithium-ion batteries currently being thrown out are phone batteries, and those aren't recycled at a great rate.

Car batteries aren't being thrown out or recycled in large quantities yet, they're lasting a lot longer than people expected.

> Most lithium-ion batteries currently being thrown out are phone batterie

Source? My guess for number of lithium batteries being thrown away would be for vapes.

It's wild to me that disposable vapes use rechargeable lithium ion batteries. Presumably it's because it's cost effective?

Rechargeable means they can save a bit of money on the size of the battery, among other things.

It's also the case that you don't throw out a car. Car batteries (that is, the ones that ICE vehicles use) have an incredible rate of recycling. It's not like you're going to throw an EV in the crusher without taking the battery out first, and if you don't recycle the battery...what the heck are you going to do with it?

I wouldn't be surprised if currently only a small number of batteries are recycled. I would be extremely surprised if the same is true in ten years.

What percentage of lithium iron batteries that have crossed your desk ended up recycled?

All? It's not like you can throw them in the trash, so where else would I bring them except to the battery recycling collection point?

You intended for them to be recycled, but just because you dropped it at a recycling depot or disposal doesn't mean they got recycled.

There are countless stories and studies showing that only a fraction of recyclable materials actually make it through recycling - it's kind of an E for Effort state for anything but glass and metal :(

In Montreal, the Eco Centre accepts batteries and then “sends them to a recycler”

It’s almost impossible to know what that actually means. if you look up a local company like li-cycle all they do is grind up the batteries into a powder, which is then sold to off takers and licycles case these off takers, actually only extract, nickel and cobalt from the batteries. This is the tip of the iceberg. There’s no way to know what actually happens to your battery after it is given to the city. Notably, plastic recycling is fake, and my city just makes a giant pile of plastic separate from the giant pile of garbage.

> Notably, plastic recycling is fake, and my city just makes a giant pile of plastic separate from the giant pile of garbage.

For some measures of "fake". The German PET bottle deposit scheme works relatively well, as the material collected is pure PET with very little contamination.

For pretty much every other type of plastic, "recycling" usually means thermal use, aka burning it for district heating.

That actually sounds about right

The amount of valuable materials in a battery pack is actually quite small.

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