What Will Happen to All the Dead Electric Car Batteries?
This battery waste problem has an epistemological status similar to that of dowsing and witchcraft.<p>Right now there are both articles about how lithium mining is terrible and expensive (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.co.uk&#x2F;article&#x2F;lithium-batteries-environment-impact" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.co.uk&#x2F;article&#x2F;lithium-batteries-environmen...</a> &quot;The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction&quot;†) and articles like this one about how we&#x27;re producing a massive waste stream containing high concentrations of valuable metals like lithium, cobalt, and manganese.  (A 2600-mAh 18650 cell contains about 800 mg of lithium, and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lygte-info.dk&#x2F;review&#x2F;batteries2012&#x2F;Aosibo IMR18650 2600mAh (Yellow) UK.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lygte-info.dk&#x2F;review&#x2F;batteries2012&#x2F;Aosibo IMR18650...</a> says it weighs 45 g, so it&#x27;s 1.78% lithium by weight, 35 times as concentrated as the brine.  At US$13k&#x2F;tonne that&#x27;s about 1¢ of lithium per battery.)<p>People throwing out valuable metals while other people are spending a lot of money to recover those same valuable metals from highly diluted deposits?  This sounds like a case for... <i>capitalism</i>!<p>(This is <i>completely different</i> from the <i>old</i> battery waste problem, where mercury was included in disposable battery electrodes in order to stabilize the battery chemistry, which is a serious toxicity hazard and a real pain in the ass to separate out.  That&#x27;s never been the case with lithium batteries and has even been eliminated from almost all disposable batteries now.)<p>As pointed out in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;808&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;808&#x2F;</a>, if dowsing could tell you what was under the ground, companies would be using it to make a killing in oil prospecting.  If casting hexes on your enemies worked, companies would be using it to make a killing in... killing.  Military contracting.  (Actually, probably military leaders would.)  And, when there&#x27;s a significant waste stream of lithium batteries available, companies are going to make a killing by buying up these used lithium batteries for 10¢&#x2F;kg and extracting 23¢&#x2F;kg of lithium from them.<p>Until then, it&#x27;s not a problem.<p>Unless somehow modern capitalism is failing to be ruthlessly profit-focused enough.<p>______<p>† The Wired article says &quot;500,000 gallons [of water] per tonne of lithium&quot;, which, in non-historical-re-enactment units, is 1.9 million liters per tonne, but probably more accurately 2 million liters.  That puts the lithium content of the brine at 0.05%.