Japan develops a method to recover up to 90% of lithium from used EV batteries

I am worried about both. Why are you picking sides? At lease fossil fuels started slow. Here we are switching to an unknown solution(s) on a massive scale..

>but they are batteries with 10 to 20 years of service life as opposed to ~1 week worth of fuel transported, refined, and burned. Yes they pollute, but they pollute a lot less, particularly over their lifetime.

CO2 at least have a natural mechanism by which it gets removed. And the affects of CO2 accumulation is not as acute. I am not sure about the materials that potentially could be used.

Also you say they pollute less. But as I said, the devil is in the details. Remember that the lead that used to get added to gas turned out to be very bad. So may be it is something like that that would be added to the battery chemistry to make it last longer or work better in cold or what not...

It is disturbing that people are just handwaving such possibilities away. I think that was exactly how we got here. But now doing the same could end up a lot more worse...

Because we need a way to generate motion and one method is clearly less pollutant and less toxic than the other, EVs.

Obviously bikes would be even better, but those don't have the capacity to transport everything and everyone we need. If there was another even better way to do things I'd be in favor of that. But as it stands, batteries and electric motors are king in terms of low pollution. (Ok, the absolute best is electric trains and trolleys. But those require infrastructure governments are unwilling to build out.)

> At lease fossil fuels started slow. Here we are switching to an unknown solution(s) on a massive scale

IDK what you mean by slow, but as I mentioned before, a very large quantity of fossil fuels are burnt and released into the atmosphere. That's not a slow process. BEVs only potentially release pollution on manufacturing and then give 10 to 20 years of service life. That's an extremely slow pollution release.

> CO2 at least have a natural mechanism by which it gets removed.

One that's much slower than the production. But also CO2 is not the only thing released when you burn fuel. The others are also linked to negative health outcomes. PM2.5 globally is almost entirely related to burning fossil fuels (though it also goes crazy when wild fires rage). It is linked to a wide range of health problems [1]

> Also you say they pollute less. But as I said, the devil is in the details. Remember that the lead that used to get added to gas turned out to be very bad. So may be it is something like that that would be added to the battery chemistry to make it last longer or work better in cold or what not...

A very key detail that made the lead in gasoline particularly dangerous and bad is the fact that gasoline is burned and spewed into the air. That's a detail I think you are missing.

There is no part in the battery lifecycle that involves discharging the chemicals used (except for H2O during the drying process) into the atmosphere or general environment. And that sort of waste is particularly undesirable. The goal of recycling the batteries is to capture as many of the minerals involved as possible.

Even the worst and absolutely most irresponsible form of battery disposal where we just throw them into landfills and they release all their internal chemicals into the landfill isn't an environmental disaster. The landfills are already a swimming pool of toxic materials and it's job is to contain them.

> It is disturbing that people are just handwaving such possibilities away. I think that was exactly how we got here. But now doing the same could end up a lot more worse...

What's disturbing is you aren't using critical thinking. You are fear mongering. "There could be some unknown unknown which makes these actually bad". Your argument could be used for why we SHOULD put lead into gas. "Well, we don't know what relies on that lead in the environment, if we remove it we could end up damaging lead organisms that have adapted!"

We've thought about it, a lot. Burning fossil fuels is an ongoing global disaster. Batteries would significantly reduce and potentially eliminate the use of fossil fuels. They result in cleaner air, less emissions, and importantly an extremely easy to contain and monitor lifecycle.

Lead acid batteries completely prove this. There are problems with recycling them but those problems are entirely local issues rather than global issue. LiPo, even if they end up being handled irresponsibly, would still end up doing far less damage to the world environment and everyone that isn't directly working with those batteries. We put everything even potentially toxic about the battery in a welded shut cylinder. In 99% of cases, the only way that stuff comes out is someone using force to break open the cylinder.

In the case of fossil fuels, everything is spewed directly into the environment. All the CO2, NOx, CO, randomly created hydrocarbon molecules, unburnt fuel, etc. These things are measurably causing cancer, asthma, heart problems, etc. Every person on the planet is forced to inhale burnt fossil fuels.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266676572...

It's been studied. You have no concrete problem you can point to. You are fear mongering because you are worried about a potential heretofore demonstrated or observed problem.

And your fears are particularly unfounded because we are actually already producing and recycling these batteries today. If there's a risk, you could point to an exact problem that's being commonly observed right now.

> On concrete terms, this would look like some regulation that require EV companies to declare a plan regarding how they will process/recycle old batteries before they launch a product. And a way to closely watch that it is being carried out.

I don't really disagree with this. My argument is entirely around the fact that even with the absence of such a regulation, the batteries come out on top in terms of their environmental impact. And they are valuable enough that recycling naturally happens without any sort of plan being put into place to handle them.

> As of now, anything "green" gets a free pass.

What you are giving a free pass to is fossil fuels. You are failing to account for the amount of damage they are provably doing right now because they drop their pollutants into the atmosphere.

That's why I call your comments fear mongering. You are hyper focusing on a potential unproven issue that will provably be nowhere near as damaging as burning fossil fuels even in the worst imaginable case as a way to say "Maybe we should just keep burning fossil fuels because they are a better known bad thing".

If we grounded up every single battery ever produced and dumped that particulate matter into the ocean, we will have done far less damage than what's already been done to the ocean from fossil fuel extraction and burning. There is simply not enough material in these batteries to cause the sort of damage you are worried about. Even if these things were all made of the worst most toxic elements imaginable (they aren't).