The price of lithium carbonate is skyrocketing in response to demand for EVs (especially following the Inflation Reduction Act's EV tax incentives): https://www.axios.com/2022/09/21/lithium-prices-electric-vehicles-evs. Solid state batteries may reduce but not eliminate demand.<p>Ridwell is the only startup I can think of offering battery recycling as a service and it's just a fraction of their overall model.<p>Is lithium recycling from consumer electronics viable? "Green" in both senses of the word.
Redwood Materials (Founded by Tesla’s ex-CTO & cofounder JB Straubel) has agreements with Ford, Volvo, and Toyota and currently recycles 6GWh of cells annually [1] [2]<p>Sourcing from recycled cells is cheaper than mined inputs. With that said, batteries last much longer than anticipated [3] [4], so while it’s environmentally responsible to recycle end of life cells (versus landfilling or them ending up in an incinerator), they won’t be a significant material stream for some time.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/news/redwood-materials-creates-the-first-pathways-for-end-of-life-electric-vehicles-kicks-off-in-california" rel="nofollow">https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/news/redwood-materials-crea...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a40613774/redwood-materials-recycling-vw-ev-batteries/" rel="nofollow">https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a40613774/redwood-m...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32758881" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32758881</a><p>[4] <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/08/01/electric-car-batteries-lasting-longer-than-predicted-delays-recycling-programs/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/08/01/electric...</a>
Unless we can find a technology that seriously reduces or eliminates the need for lithium, recycling it will be mandatory or we'll simply run out.<p>How long it will be before we've used up the earth's lithium supply is very much in debate. It depends on how large the demand will be, which is a thing we can only speculate about.<p>But current estimates range from 20 to 200 years.
I don't know about whether lithium recycling supply chains are better or worse than lithium mining supply chains from an environmental or GhG perspective but there is no doubt a great deal of academic literature on the topic, as there is for all other economically significant metals.
I do however know that the numbers for steel production are heavily in favor of recycling, if that helps.<p>Prices, being social constructs, have very little to do with the green attributes (or lack) of any traded commodity.
Lithium is not viable long-term. In the short term it is, and the great fallacy of our time is that it is renewable. There are even memes on TikTok of people charging their Teslas with a petrol generator if you care to look.<p>The only real way to solve this is mining space asteroids which contain <i>much</i> more (rare) precious metals than our earth can provide.
Nothing is 'virtue signaling'.<p>It's not a real thing.<p>If you can rephrase the question without using that phrase then you should. If you can't rephrase the question without that phrase then you're not asking anything that can be answered.