Comment by trhway
5 months ago
>So if an electric car requires 2000 pounds of iron and 50 pounds of lithium, that works out to 4000 pounds of iron ore that needs to be mined and refined, vs 25,000 pounds of lithium ore.
means recycling of lithium batteries will be a thriving business. (i.e. big difference from recycling of say tires or plastic bottles, more like, pretty successful, recycling of aluminum, and even better than it)
Li-ion batteries are older than you think. First volume production of NMC cells happened 1991. LFP in 1997. Google was founded 1998.
No one made fortune in Li-ion recycling in all those years. Li-ion cells remained disposable.
Lithium cells are still disposable (eg vapes). The difference is that a single EV contains hundreds of kilograms are we are not used to just chucking old cars in the gutter.
The volume of batteries wasn't there, neither did we really have the network to sell scrap batteries like we do with used cars.