171–180 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...
Being able to quickly skim articles is definitely a skill that has paid in spades since the advent of AI slop.
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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…
Lithium batteries are less toxic than most other battery chemistries (including lead acid batteries). The major toxic portion of lithium batteries comes in the form of production, but not the actual materials involved in the battery.
The battery tech also isn't changing as much as you might think. Don't get me wrong, it is getting better, but a lot of that isn't really by changing the underlying formula for the batteries, but rather tweaking the processes for creating the structure of the battery.
That's not to say that you want to inhale the smoke of a burning lithium battery. But these batteries don't have any heavy metals in them. The materials they do have tend to already be in abundance in the environment. A major part of the reason for that is these batteries do need to be cheap. Heavy metals drive up the price.
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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.
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…
Not really true. There are plenty of non-toxic elements in the ground.
The actual issue with mining is that the elements we are after are often surrounded by the likes of arsenic. Gold is a great example of this as veins of it are often right along and in arsenic.
That said, I do agree about being conscious of what sort of undesirables get leached out from the stuff we pull from the ground. For example, I recently learned that the reason we have to be worried about mercury in ocean fish is because mercury is a major part of the pollutants spewed from coal plants.
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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.
There are other toxic substance like phosphorus in "lithium" batteries. Some "lithium" battery chemistries, though reportedly not LFP, contain cobalt, a very toxic heavy metal. Besides, there isn't a clear definition of what is a heavy metal. Even iron and copper, used in LFP, are considered heavy metals by some. BTW, lithium itself is highly toxic too.
Cobalt is neither particularly toxic nor a heavy metal. In fact, it's a part of vitamin B12. You might be thinking of Cadmium, which is indeed a very toxic and nasty metal.
In LiPos the heaviest metals are Iron and Nickel. That's by design. Heavier metals tend to be more expensive to procure.
In trace amounts, by both weight and volume lithium batteries are mostly nickel and/or iron.
> There are other toxic substance like phosphorus in "lithium" batteries. Some "lithium" battery chemistries
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> BTW, lithium itself is highly toxic too.
Both phosphorous and lithium are fertilizers. Yes, taking in a very large dose of both is poisonous, but the same is true of salt.
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India is a lot like Russia in that its people and standards of living are very different from place to place. China, despite a larger size and similar population is more culturally uniform than India, especially once you go in more remote areas. (this is not a diss on India, i think that make the country much more interesting)
> China, despite a larger size and similar population is more culturally uniform than India If rumour is to be believed, this isn’t a coincidence and had been done by the regime.
Some geopolitical context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Senkaku_boat_collision_in... https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/comme... Japan was one of the first countries to be hit with rare-earth export-restrictions by China - going back to 2010. It seems that a lot of policy came out from this unpleasant shock, incl. the decision by Toyota to focus on developing FCEVs which would be less depend…
I don't understand how "Japan is betting on Hydrogen" meme survived this long. Toyota sold something like up to 20k total of passenger FCEV in past 10-20 years. That's less than a quarter worth in Prius sales numbers. It always has been a joke and a futurism porn. Is it coming from some internal Slack channel at Tesla or something? Whoever spreading it don't know what they're talking about.
It's a bit silly to downplay their investment based on the sales numbers of Toyota Mirai.
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...
Thank you. Among other important points there: "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…
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>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…
who cares? India is very dirty even without any kind of manufacturing - awful mentality of just throwing trash and shit around.
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…
This is probably somewhat true, but also I suspect there might be an order of magnitude difference from extracting trace lithium from inert rock vs collecting it as a salt from amongst a medley of very refined metals. Case in point - lead acid batteries are not a fair comparison. A lead acid battery is so robust you can separate the cathodes and anodes with your (gloved) hands. Getting the elements out of a lead batt…