You know what the richest ore for finding metals for new batteries is? Old batteries. Same applies to solar panels. This is great to see.
this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2026
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Yeah ive played rimworld too.
Also for aluminum it’s cheaper to recycle aluminum than to produce it from raw ore.
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I believe 10% of a lithium battery is lithium. I mean, it's impressive and I love a closed loop for the life of any component, but this doesn't really solve our need for more lithium. Reduce it yes, but not end the requirement for more extraction
But I presume a new battery also only need 10% lithium?
Right, I don't understand their point. Recycling 90% of a battery is still 90% of a new battery.
It also assumes that we'd still using the same amount of lithium when we get to a point that it's not so cheap they put it in disposable cigarettes.
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Any metal in a car needs mining and extraction.
You would not believe how inefficient mining is for platinum and rhodium in ICE catalytic convertors. The oil and gas industry has really drilled into the heads of people that lithium is evil.
"The process starts with old batteries being separated and burned to strip away non-metal components. What's left gets crushed into something called black mass. This is essentially a powder packed with recoverable metals. From there, a water-based chemical treatment called hydrometallurgy pulls the lithium out. One clever distinction in this new process is that the recovered lithium hydroxide actually replaces a chemical traditionally used during refining. This cuts the carbon footprint by about 40% compared to older methods."
Article also said that previous methods got about 45% of the lithium from recycling.
seems like a significant breakthrough
Now we just need to stop big oil propaganda and lobbying from shitting all over EV sales
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Dumb question... how are they burning them? I thought controlling lithium battery fires was difficult?
They are hard to put out, but if you want them to burn all you really need is a safe place to do it. So in a big crucible with some type of fume extraction so they aren't crazy polluting the air. As long as the heat has somewhere safe to go and there isn't anything else to catch on fire, burning things is easy.
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Jerry Rigs Everything Video about lithium recycling to black mass.
Recycled lithium uses 70% less energy than virgin freshly mined lithium, and lithium, like aluminum, in infinitely recyclable.
Assholes like Jeremy Clarkson don't get this.
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big oil's about to start yet another denialism campaigh
I just want the fucking oil mafia to burn at sun’s temperature. They are such a fucking obstacle and disgrace to humanity’s development. Same goes for the big pharma. All the suffering just because of greed for a piece of paper with £/₹/$/€ on it.
Ok angry rant over.
Oil companies are today what the Catholic church were to science in the middle ages.
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Capitalism rewards profit. Imagine basing all aspects of life on profit making. Of course human needs, interests, environment health etc. take up a side-role in such a system.
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Ok it needs to be said. The smart play is to have governments to subsidize this process and build up the raw inventory for lithium. That way, ie (US) could have tons and tons of raw lithium without having to mine it.
Wouldn't it be smarter to use old EV batteries for grid storage?
Why not both? Downcycle the old EV batteries for grid storage, then when they reach the end of useful life, recycle them. We need to resurrect the first 2 R's (Reduce, Reuse) to be able to survive on this planet.
They are listed in order of importance.. reduce first, if you can't, then reuse. If you can't reuse, then recycle.
Problem is, we saw "recycle" and thougt "infinite resources" and ditched the other two.. turns out that most things cant really be recycled, so now it's just landfill all the way
I wish I could remember where I read it, but the focus on just Recycle was encouraged as the main narrative by corporations which didn't want to give up the myth of endless growth.
The batteries don't last forever, eventually, they need to be dealt with somehow.
Also grid storage doesn't have the sort of deep, rapid discharge/charge cycles that EVs go through. Once an EV battery is no good in the car, it still has about 80% of it's useable capacity left. Meaning, there will always be a need for "new" EV batteries, but grid storage would saturate and leave surplus batteries. Not to mention, as the grid storage batteries fall out of their useful life for that purpose, they can be recycled into new EV batteries and begin the cycle anew.
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That's great and all, but not all batteries need lithium. When another battery technology gets mature enough to surpass lithium based batteries, then we'll still be stuck on old tech cause the government is subsiding it.
This also reduces the incentive for making more lithium efficient batteries.
Subsidies can help, but they need to be more generalized so they don't create issues moving past current tech. Heck, look at how much trouble we're having getting past oil, that's a perfect example.
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We recover 99% of lead from car batteries. The same lead is used over and over.
Lead is much easier to purify than lithium.
Because we really have not tried.
Lithium recycling has never been the problem. The problem is most EVs are new, and people aren't buying enough of them, so there isn't enough capacity of old batteries in the system yet for business to profit from building the plants to do the recycling. And now some stupid orange asshole has been sabotaging production, so we're not going to hit that tipping point for decades.
In the USA. Us Europeans are happily treading toward carbon neutrality, even more since the cheetos' fun war with Iran.
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tl;dr:
Rub them on a big piece of carpet.
I remember reading another article that said that their incinerated sewage waste had more gold per ton than their highest yielding mines.
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