Apparently, recovery of lithium from batteries during recycling is not economical, either in terms of money or energy efficiency. Additionally, lithium batteries are more difficult to recycle due to their complexity and the amount of variation between battery types.

Compare this with lead acid batteries. About 99% of lead acid batteries are recycled, and the recycling process itself is rather efficient.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214993714...

Too bad it just didn't happen to be easy. I would hold out some hope for recycling simply given that each Tesla model 3 size battery has 3,000$+ of raw materials, and there will be literally billions of cells with identical design to recycle. I would find it an interesting fact of the world that it's cheaper to go back into the Earth's crust to get more than to somehow separate it out from a pre-existing source that is highly concentrated.

$3,000+ of raw materials is not the same thing as $3,000+ of lithium. The batteries are already recycled to recover the cobalt and manganese, which are valuable. The numbers I've heard suggest that less than 1% of the material cost is lithium, but that number sounds a bit low—maybe less than 1% of the total cost is the cost of lithium, perhaps. Battery grade lithium is around $5/kg.

if you plop a lithium recycler in the middle of sahara, or arizona, where solar power is plentiful, you only have to deal with the economics.

i don't see why tesla wouldn't do exactly this a decade or two from now, when there'll be 100x more lithium batteries at or near the limit of useful capacity. it could be literally next door to the gigafactory so they could feed it with a conveyor belt.

I'm a little skeptical—it sounds like the claim here is that we just have some technical hurdles, and we'll need some cheap electricity. Missing from this discussion is an analysis of the environmental impact of recycling and the environmental impact of mining.

By no means am I making claims about how batteries will be recycled in the future, I just think we should base our policy decisions on the science. Recycling lithium batteries is not easy, since they tend to blow up. The main recycling processes either toss them in an incinerator, cryogenically freeze them, or chop them up in an inert atmosphere. Most of them recover negligible amounts of lithium, which is cheap to mine anyway.