It’s a chicken and egg problem. No one will invest the money to solve the lithium battery recycling problem at scale... until the scale exists.

But eventually... there will be so much lithium in dead car batteries that it will be too good an opportunity to look past.

Who's going to collect and sort all those lithium batteries laying around? And extract it from the batteries. The labor requirement is very heavy and doesn't scale well. Visit a landfill and try to find people who want to work doing that.

Eventually....when hardrock lithium mines run out after digging an open pit over a mile across and half a mile deep, and the salt flats of South America are covered in toxic brine.