81–90 of 113 posts
Buckminster Fuller Said it quite a few years ago. If Society did not socialize the expense of cleaning up the environment for industry we would be much farther down the road to closed loop manufacturing.
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Matter cannot be created nor destroyed. And elemental conversion is a big deal - usually involving nuclear fission or fusion. Batteries do become depleted but the lithium never disappears, I guess simply put a reverse potential is no longer able to reverse the battery equation back to the energy storing state. Presumably because there is some third reservoir state that a potential cannot reverse (without delving into…
> Matter cannot be created nor destroyed. It certainly can, E=mc^2. But it's an incredible amount of energy for how much matter you get.
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>People don’t realise this when they think of landfill. I expect you'll see increasing mining of tailings piles as things like gold extraction technology improves.
Reprocessing gold tailings for old mines with more effective and robust methods has been tried recently. I remember looking into it but IIRC the few examples I found had all folded. I really do hope we do get to the point where we can reprocess almost any solid mass into useable compounds, though.
The thing is now you’re rewarding an industry for making a mess in the first place, which is a bad pattern.
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That sandwich you're eating? Made from old recycled half eaten sandwiches.
Actually your sandwich is made from poop. The poop fertilized plants, the plants were harvested, some of them were turned into bread, others fed a pig, and that's what you're eating. Some of the poop decayed and was released as gases into the air, which were then recaptured by the plants, by bacteria in the roots of soybeans, and by Haber-Bosch factories (confusingly also called plants) which made synthetic fertilize…
If you count CO2 as “poop” the percentages rise but the fossils still are in the lead.
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FWIW: Sagan was poetic but the intuition turns out to have been wrong. Models are still not super convincing, but supernovae alone aren't enough to explain the abundance of heavy elements. A big chunk of the rare earth nuclei we apply in industry today seem likely to be tiny remnants of neutron stars that were thrown off in a merger event with another neutron star or black hole.
Huh? Are humans made of heavy elements?
Lithium is a valuable resource. EV batteries have lots of it. Therefore EV batteries are valuable even after they stop working. Lithium is valuable because extracting it from naturally occurring salt deposits is a lot of work. These salt deposits are mostly not Lithium. We are talking trace amounts here. To extract it, you have to process vast amounts of brine. Boil of the water, separate it from other materials, etc…
> Lithium is a valuable resource. EV batteries have lots of it. Therefore EV batteries are valuable even after they stop working. A Tesla battery weighs about 500 kg and has about 10kg of Lithium (2%). The Lithium is worth about $130, whereas the battery costs more than $10,000. It's difficult to extract the trace elements of lithium from the thousands of individual cells honeycombed together in the battery, so there…
Lithium is a valuable resource. EV batteries have lots of it. Therefore EV batteries are valuable even after they stop working. Lithium is valuable because extracting it from naturally occurring salt deposits is a lot of work. These salt deposits are mostly not Lithium. We are talking trace amounts here. To extract it, you have to process vast amounts of brine. Boil of the water, separate it from other materials, etc…
"Recycling" lithium batteries is already one of the preferred methods for acquiring lithium by armature chemists.
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Lithium ion batteries don't contain lithium metal. The lithium is always in the +1 oxidation state.
To me oxidized metal is a metal, but then that's why I'm not an expert in that field by any stretch of the imagination.
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I think they mean trivial compared to processing raw ore. The general assumption is that you are seeing the normal delay effects or inertia of the economy. Capital is already invested in mining and ore processing. Recycling needs to appear economically worthwhile for a long enough period for investors to grow interested and take the plunge in this new direction.
Processing ore is easier, because you can run tons of ore through an industrial process, and not have to dismantle microscopic pieces of each battery
I think proponents of this economic view of recycling often argue that you could mechanically shred/grind such post-consumer products into a big mess and think of it as a new type of high-density ore. It might take different refining stages, but they seem to have faith that industrial processing can be invented for these materials and that it ought to be less energy intensive than processing the very low density ores found in nature.
Pretty much everything is a raw material of the future. Even household waste has much higher concentrations of metals than most ore deposits.
People don’t realise this when they think of landfill. In future, we could have an effective way of mining landfill for resources. Some forms of recycling now are highly inefficient and it’s conceivable that we’d be better off utilizing landfill and recycling with better techniques later.