https://www.tesla.com/blog/teslas-closed-loop-battery-recycl...

> Working with Umicore has allowed us to completely recycle the Roadster battery packs profitably, without special financial incentives necessary to promote recycling

If you have a mass quantity of the same type of good, you can avoid most of these costs.

But suppose we never figure out a good way to recycle these batteries, and we just have to throw them all in a landfill and keep making new ones. Is that actually so terrible? There's nothing toxic in a typical li-ion battery, so basically we just have inert materials that were taken from the ground being put back in the ground. Mining for nickel/cobalt/lithium is not great for the environment, but the effect is pretty localized, so a "disposable battery future" is probably still highly preferable over the fossil fuel status quo where the entire planet is fucked.

I mean... yea?

I don't know but I look back to the 2006 Jeep Wrangler being almost entirely recyclable steel and had an effective life of 40+ years if taken care of. Then I look to new cars using composites and lithium that WILL go into a landfill 20 years or less because they're just not fixable in the same way, it's cheaper to write off of an insurance claim than to fix.

It almost seems to me there is no free lunch, but that people like new and shiny and the company with all the tech is going to be popular with tech people.

And if we're going to talk about people's irrational thought patterns about the environment... I nominate the idea that landfills matter more than atmosphere dumping, which seems to be based on the fact that landfills are more visible.