Back in my day, I worked at Bestbuy and if you have ever been in one, you may notice that we have a "recycle" area in the front of the store. It is a separated bin, labelled with "wires", "cds", "batteries", etc. The one that always confused me the most was "batteries" since almost EVERY time they would empty that bin into our recycle bin in the back, they would dump the batteries into the trash because <i>almost</i> all of them were non-lithium-ion. My manager said we couldn't recycle regular batteries so they needed thrown away and sorting through the absolute mound of batteries was too much to do.<p>I know we would receive laptop batteries, phone batteries, and other rechargeables but they never made it into the bin. I hear now, anything with a screen costs money to recycle at Bestbuy. They really seem to be taking a step in the wrong direction. Better labelled bins, and easier access to recycling areas will make it easier for the average person to recycle, which in my opinion, is a net gain for us all.
The story is unfortunately sparse on the details of how the recycling works (whether there is any truly new idea).<p>Based on the "furnace" picture and language about melting down the batteries, it seems like their approach is to just treat the incoming batteries as "enriched ore" and proceed with an energy-intensive, standard, metal extraction process.<p>So what they save is the huge amount of energy and dirtiness required to dig in the earth (in the few suitable places on the earth) for rocks with <.5% metal content and crush those rocks into dust, which is substantial, but not revolutionary?
"At the same time, the supply of used batteries is exploding."<p>That's an interesting/unfortunate choice of words given the well-documented issues with lithium-ion batteries :-)
I couldn't parse this paragraph:<p>><i>To JB Straubel, one of the brains behind Tesla Inc., TSLA -1.13%▲ that refuse holds the key to driving the electric car revolution forward—and making the vehicles affordable enough for everyone to own one.</i><p>Could someone help?<p>><i>Mr. Straubel said in his first in-depth interview about his new venture since it was formed in 2017 while still at Tesla.</i><p>Was that with Tesla's blessing?
Does anyone know what the price is for bulk e-waste a company like this would pay? Or how to find it?<p>I’ve been interested in setting up some free local e-waste collection for recycling, but it seems like the cost of collection and sorting is more than the price I can get for it.
The existence of this company itself is pretty old news, Lora Kolodny reported on it in 2018: <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/06/tesla-cto-jb-straubel-redwood-materials-recycling-expands-nevada.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/06/tesla-cto-jb-straubel-redwoo...</a><p>What's new is Tim Higgins giving JB Straubel space in the pages of WSJ to run a PR campaign for his company.
interesting timing...considering there’s a lot of scrutiny from whistleblowers and short sellers around scrap inventory on Tesla’s balance sheet and Tesla’s real relationship with this company.<p>will need to dig around but recall seeing a screenshot of either an analyst call or archived page that suggested someone let it slip this was a Tesla subsidiary and not a completely unrelated entity.
Why is battery disposal such a municipality-dependent shitshow in the US? The vast majority of cities I've lived in, with the exception of san francisco, essentially encourage people to throw their batteries directly in the trash by providing no disposal mechanism via municipal waste collection. This is much, much more dangerous in the short term with lithium ion batteries.
<a href="https://thebulletin.org/2009/01/the-limits-of-energy-storage.." rel="nofollow">https://thebulletin.org/2009/01/the-limits-of-energy-storage...</a>.<p>Get the word out. Batteries are bad hydrogen is good. Current hydrogen gas will have more energy than batteries at peak technology growth. This matters because hydrogen cars are cheaper, more scalable, and more inclusive than battery cars. Rich people get battery cars, you get a battery bike.