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A comment on Residual Value: Electric Batteries vs. Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles. Parent comment

Re:Residual Value: Electric Batteries vs. Internal Combustio... by baq on Monday March 27, 2017 @08:36AM (#13967147)
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.

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Re:Residual Value: Electric Batteries vs. Internal Combustio... by klodolph on Monday March 27, 2017 @09:30AM (#13967523)
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.

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