Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When we extract ore from a given area, it's mixed with just a few different compounds. This is pretty far from the truth. Rock is less chemically complex than living plants, animals, and fungi, it's true; but there's a long distance from "less than hundreds of millions" to "just a few". The article explains how it's done in the case of lithium-ion batteries. It is true that to the extent that you can reduce the adm…
My comment was in reply to mining trash dumps. Batteries obviously have a small (-ish) set of possible compounds and it should be economically feasible to recycle used batteries once there is sufficient volume that needs to be recycled. (I guess we're still at least a decade away but that remains to be seen... if it's sufficiently efficient, it could be cheaper to recycle than reuse older batteries).
Re: Old electric cars are a raw material of the future
#111Yeah, I was saying you can use the same processes for mining trash dumps that you use for mining natural rock. Maybe there are more economically productive techniques specific to mining trash dumps (computer vision with conveyor belts, desoldering electronic components, deshredding correspondence to blackmail politicians with) but the usual rock-processing techniques form a minimal baseline. If you heat anything up enough it becomes rock again. (And gaseous oxides like those of carbon and sulfur.)