151–160 of 208 posts
The article is very, very light with details. The university or research center is not named. No scientist is named. No link. Nothing that tells "look, we're telling you real, solid, serious stuff." Here is another article with that details : https://www.techspot.com/news/112051-japan-finds-way-recover...
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U.S. lead acid baterries recycling has been outsourced. " As the United States tightened regulations on lead processing to protect Americans over the past three decades, finding domestic lead became a challenge. So the auto industry looked overseas to supplement its supply. In doing so, car and battery manufacturers pushed the health consequences of lead recycling onto countries where enforcement is lax, testing is r…
>countries where enforcement is lax As an Indian this is exactly one of the reasons why I am afraid of EV boom. All of that bad stuff, which we are mostly unfamiliar with (in terms of how to handle it properly, because battery tech is always changing) is going to dumped in places like India. And would silently sustain the bad effects for many decades or even more, until it (the bad stuff) somehow reaches some develop…
The article is very, very light with details. The university or research center is not named. No scientist is named. No link. Nothing that tells "look, we're telling you real, solid, serious stuff." Here is another article with that details : https://www.techspot.com/news/112051-japan-finds-way-recover...
"That said, Japan isn't the only country pursuing lithium recovery. In the US, Redwood Materials – the recycling company founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel – says it's already recovering 95% of lithium from the equivalent of about 250,000 EVs per year."
EV batteries are too large and valuable to wind up in landfills, although I'm sure it has happened somewhere. I do like that Japan is is making it harder to just throw out smaller lithium batteries. That strikes me as a more probable source of waste.
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Don't get on such a high horse about US regulatory effectiveness. This is recently (2010) in California even: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exide_lead_contamination Still, the overall benefit might be seen as positive for lithium from shifting widespread air pollution from combustion engines to more localized pollution. Though obviously the world needs to work on better processes for the local pollutants.
The "advantage" is that in contrast to heavy metals like lead lithium is a lot less toxic as far as we know. Not 0, but not in the same league.
BTW, lithium itself is highly toxic too.
This isn't just an LLMism, it's a painfully redundant phrase. Not much worth me reading forward if even the authors weren't arsed to write the damn thing.
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Anything that you can dig/pump out of the ground is toxic, particularly to water resources, and if you don’t recognize upfront that, be it the military, companies or government, you have to be prepared to clean up your mess, in short, factor in cleanup and the cost of using rare earths or any other item you can dig up on land or pump from the sea or land, but worldwide, mankind is still not quite there in terms of re…
> Anything that you can dig/pump out of the ground is toxic Carrots?
It really should not be surprising that we can get very high recovery percentages from batteries -- we do not mine elemental lithium, so the processes we use for extraction are already designed to extract lithium from fairly low-purity sources. In contrast, lithium batteries are an incredibly high-purity source of lithium. The main question is when it will become cost-effective to create recycling pipelines. Lead aci…
I think the issues with recycling lithium from electrolyte containing lithium hexafluorophosphate in solvents is more the hexafluorophosphate part; it's highly reactive, hygroscopic and releases (toxic, corrosive) hydrogen fluoride upon contact with water. So purely from economic perspective it's possibly not worth it unless we are very lithium-constrained. Of course it should be done anyway as there will be a lot of…
The necessity for recycling those batteries, without more, does not logically follow from their relative abundance in view of the purely economic perspective you posit. Why not just bury them?
It may be the scarcity of lithium that may drive us to take otherwise expensive steps to recycle such batteries.
The conclusory "of course" sets the argument up for a failure from the outset. Though it is not the only flaw.
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If you've ever seen a video of Nigerians "recycling" lead batteries you'd be hard pressed to call it that. Katana in one hand, bucket on the floor, no shoes, let's go.
I confess I am not sure what role the katana plays in Nigerian lead battery recycling.
I remember how Lead acid battery recycling has now become commonplace even in fairly under developed parts of the world. I guess it's all about incentives. sigh.