We also tend to put plastic into contact with food and small packaging, create many different types and form factors, and ship it consumers. I imagine the recycling problem for a known environment (e.g. a power facility's used batteries) vs an unknown environment (e.g. consumer houses) is significantly different.
I do wonder (and a quick google search didn't turn much up) how the rates of industrial plastic recycling compare with consumer rates.
Time will tell. Right now no industrial-scale deployments have reached EoL, so it's not surprising that there's little recycling. Plus those things also contain cobalt, which is significantly more expensive, plastic doesn't have that incentive.
No cobalt in the new dry battery tech they got from the Maxwell acquisition.
I hope Tesla has a plan for recycling the batteries they manufacture
Re:Megapack: Utility-Scale Energy Storage
by toomuchtodo on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @01:16AM
(#20562297)
Tesla is already recycling batteries at Gigafactory 1.
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1122631_tesla-launches-...
Lead acid batteries, a mature battery technology, have a 99% recycling rate in the USA [1] (and similar rates in other developed economies).
[1] https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/battery-council-inter...
Re:Megapack: Utility-Scale Energy Storage
by rcMgD2BwE72F on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @05:24AM
(#20563269)
>batteries are not currently recycled in any scale equivalent to these proposals
They're already recycled at >50% https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/07/12/lithium-ion-recycling... although there's still no need to recycle them in volume (since we are only starting to deploy Li-Ion batteries for EV and stationary storage, which last for more than a decade)
In theory, batteries are not currently recycled in any scale equivalent to these proposals. Plastic is also recyclable but most of it ends up in landfills due to it being uneconomical.