The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling
1–10 of 99 posts
Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling
#2AFAICT, used Tesla battery packs fetch a decent price on ebay etc. They're more valuable for reuse than they are for recycling. Reuse is better than recycling.
Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling
#3AFAICT, used Tesla battery packs fetch a decent price on ebay etc. They're more valuable for reuse than they are for recycling. Reuse is better than recycling.
For sure, but 5? 10? years from now those re-used batteries will probably not be usable at all, right?
Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling
#4The lie that electric vehicles are better for the environment than internal combustion needs to stop. Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit impoverished counties and extract their lithium reserves while destroying their environments. We will not clean up when we finish. Lithium batteries will pollute our water supplies here at home when they aren't properly disposed. This is a giant environmental scam promoted to make us feel good about "saving" the earth. I don't believe for a second that corporate democrats care about the environment.
We need widespread renewable electricity generation first anyway. Otherwise our electric cars will be running on coal.
Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling
#5AFAICT, used Tesla battery packs fetch a decent price on ebay etc. They're more valuable for reuse than they are for recycling. Reuse is better than recycling.
For sure, but 5? 10? years from now those re-used batteries will probably not be usable at all, right?
It depends. What kills the batteries is fast charging or discharging and to an extent, leaving them sitting around fully charged or discharged. If the batteries are retired to do grid storage (or home storage), I would expect the charge and discharge rates to be fairly sedate, and charge levels to be managed so as not to have the battery level too low or too high for very long. I can easily imagine the batteries lasting a long time under such conditions.
Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling
#6AFAICT, used Tesla battery packs fetch a decent price on ebay etc. They're more valuable for reuse than they are for recycling. Reuse is better than recycling.
For sure, but 5? 10? years from now those re-used batteries will probably not be usable at all, right?
And at that point it'll cheaper to "mine" those batteries for their cobalt, nickel and lithium than it will be to pull it out of the ground. At that point recycling will be viable because they'll have a large amount of fairly homogeneous batteries to recycle rather than the random hodge-podge of tiny batteries they have to deal with now.
Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling
#7The lie that electric vehicles are better for the environment than internal combustion needs to stop. Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit impoverished counties and extract their lithium reserves while destroying their environments. We will not clean up when we finish. Lithium batteries will pollute our water supplies here at home when they aren't properly disposed. This is a giant environmental…
What's your plan for moving around when our limited supply of fossil fuels are depleted?
Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
For sure, but 5? 10? years from now those re-used batteries will probably not be usable at all, right?
It depends. What kills the batteries is fast charging or discharging and to an extent, leaving them sitting around fully charged or discharged. If the batteries are retired to do grid storage (or home storage), I would expect the charge and discharge rates to be fairly sedate, and charge levels to be managed so as not to have the battery level too low or too high for very long. I can easily imagine the batteries last…
Space and weight are also much less of a concern. A stationary infrastructure battery with less than half its original capacity wouldn't be unusable the way it would be for a car.
Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling
#9The lie that electric vehicles are better for the environment than internal combustion needs to stop. Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit impoverished counties and extract their lithium reserves while destroying their environments. We will not clean up when we finish. Lithium batteries will pollute our water supplies here at home when they aren't properly disposed. This is a giant environmental…
I'm not sure that's an accurate assessment.
1. Reduced dependency on oil = less money in oil = less money for a lot of countries that historically act quite poorly on the world stage.
2. 100% better for global warming than combustion cars.
3. Is mining lithium & disposing on lithium batteries incorrectly worse for the environment than oil manufacturing, production & transport? I don't know 100% but the massive oil spills we regularly have would make me think lithium is actually better here.
4. Lithium batteries at grid-scale reduce blackouts which means you don't spin up a bunch of local generators. They also make wind & solar power generation available off-peak reducing reliance on coal & natural gas.
5. Are car batteries likely to be improperly recycled? I would think legislation would minimize the problem. Even without legislation, my impression is that today's used car batteries are still extremely valuable & end up being reused rather than recycled.
6. More investment in lithium ion batteries = more money & investment in better batteries (lithium ion or otherwise). This improves efficiency across the board for mobile applications, cars, grid applications, etc (something we don't get with internal combustion engines).
The incomplete reasoning in your post is you're evaluating lithium standalone instead of examining the cost vs replacement (how does lithium ion fare against alternatives? are there better alternatives). Can you propose what you see as better alternatives rather than just making blanket complaints and blaming corporate democrats? (Also, lithium batteries are now a left/right idealogy thing? WTF).
Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling
#10The lie that electric vehicles are better for the environment than internal combustion needs to stop. Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit impoverished counties and extract their lithium reserves while destroying their environments. We will not clean up when we finish. Lithium batteries will pollute our water supplies here at home when they aren't properly disposed. This is a giant environmental…
The parent comment is a pack of memes straight out of a propaganda machine.
https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/new-data-show-electri...
Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it, but that energy is increasingly sourced by clean energy sources. Let me cite the oil company, BP.
https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat...
Coal is in terminal decline. Solar and wind have been growing exponentially, and are on a path to pass coal within the decade. Projections to the contrary have to explain why decades of industrial economics theory are wrong, where manufactured goods (like solar and wind generators) get cheaper by a fairly consistent % every time you double production. This creates a virtuous cycle that will drive coal and other fossil fuels out of business through profit seeking alone. (We are past the tipping point on costs here.) The burden of proof is on the fossil fuel advocates like yourself at this point. (This article is from 2015, and the IEA and similar keep getting it wrong since then.)
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2015/11/17/why-the-iea-is-consis...