| ▲ | brandonagr2 5 days ago |
| What is the negative externality of recycling batteries? That is way better than having to mine minerals out of the ground, eventually there won't need to be any significant mining and all the battery minerals will be in a constant cycle of being used then recycled |
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| ▲ | barbazoo 5 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| I know very little of chemistry and how batteries are produced, so from that level I'm imagining that once a battery is deemed to have reached end-of-life, it will have to get shipped somewhere, be recycled/refurbished for which presumably we will need some new material which needs to be mined, shipped, etc. All that requires water, produces waste that may or may not be toxic, the metals may come from places lacking human rights, and takes energy which may or may not be clean [1]. So all this could in the end have a considerable amount of negative externality somewhere. What I like that I'm hearing about this CO2 battery, whether true will have to be seen, is that it might rely on off the shelf components, that's great, means the supply chain can be simple, and has longer life in the first place. And that while potentially even cheaper? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSzh8D8Of0k |
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| ▲ | tehjoker 5 days ago | parent [-] | | This is cool, but one thing to consider is that you're not going to be getting that CO2 from the atmosphere, but from captured emissions. When that plant is decomissioned, the path of least resistance is to just vent it. | | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker 5 days ago | parent [-] | | If you've already got pure CO2 in a tank, sequestering it is a much easier problem. The hard part is capturing it out of smokestack emissions or (especially) directly from the atmosphere as it's much more diffuse. |
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| ▲ | throwaway3b03 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Except that the recycling ... cycle is not perfect. Far from it. I'd reckon maybe half of all lithium ends up in recycling. Other half probably ends up in the landfill. For instance, I picked up a broken ebike from the trash not long ago (Amsterdam). Battery still in it. Same goes for lots of smaller electronics. |
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| ▲ | nicoburns 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That's true, but seems unlikely to be an issue for EV batteries. Cars are large and valuable enough that there are established businesses that deal with scrapping them. | |
| ▲ | cogman10 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | That changes rapidly as EVs and grid storage take off. 99+% of those will be recycled and those will make up the bulk of lithium battery consumption. |
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| ▲ | slow_typist 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You will not get back 100 % of the raw material in any economically feasible process though. If your process gets 90% of the lithium out of the battery, after 7 cycles more than half of the lithium is gone. Therefore Mining can’t stop even when the market doesn’t grow anymore. |
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| ▲ | matthewdgreen 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Current BESS are rated to last 10-15 years. Battery makers are already moving to lithium-free sodium chemistries. It's hard to imagine what we'll be using at the end of seven full cycles (70-105 years from now.) Sodium? Tiny fusion reactors? Firewood and charcoal? Yes, we should care about this and try to leave our descendants with good solutions. No, we should not think about it so much that we leave our descendants with a devastatingly acidified ocean and uninhabitable equatorial regions in the process of worrying about it. | | | |
| ▲ | epistasis 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The process of battery manufacturing is always improving, getting more storage with less lithium. So when a battery is recycled, it will actually produce more battery than the original battery, even with lithium losses. We don't know how long that process will go on, but in any case the amount of lithium needed will be a steady state, assuming constant need for batteries. But much more likely we will see ever increasing demand for batteries, just as we do for steel or copper or whatever minerals power our current economy. | | |
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| ▲ | 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
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