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A comment on Study: Recycled Lithium Batteries as Good as Newly Mined. Parent comment

Re:Study: Recycled Lithium Batteries as Good as Newly Mined by Gigachad on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @06:44PM (#28924686)
What _is_ the true price of a resource though? You have to ration it out for a certain length of time, but what is the end date? Do we ensure we have supply for 100 years? 1000?

I'm not trying to shit on the idea because I think we genuinely need to do something but I can't come up with any rational way to calculate the true cost of limited resources.

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Re:Study: Recycled Lithium Batteries as Good as Newly Mined by asimpletune on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @07:26PM (#28924998)
I think that's the real question. How much does it cost to add a bunch of packaging that serves no purpose other than to sell the item? I have no idea.

At the same, I don't think doing nothing at all a good alternative. If anything I don't even think this is the biggest obstacle. That's probably the fact that literally no country in the world wants to volunteer to put themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

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Re:Study: Recycled Lithium Batteries as Good as Newly Mined by webmaven on Wednesday October 20, 2021 @04:10PM (#28935751)
> I think that's the real question. How much does it cost to add a bunch of packaging that serves no purpose other than to sell the item? I have no idea.

I think that it has been established that the cost of packaging is smaller than the marginal increase in profits from greater sales (from the perspective of the manufacturers and retailers).

In theory, an AR-heavy economy could displace packaging costs with AR facsimiles overlaid on generic (even standardized) packaging, but I don't think that would be a win, energy-wise.

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Re:Study: Recycled Lithium Batteries as Good as Newly Mined by Gigachad on Wednesday October 20, 2021 @05:12PM (#28936693)
At least the future is online sales which do not need fancy packaging. Although they do often involve an extra plastic shipping bag.
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Re:Study: Recycled Lithium Batteries as Good as Newly Mined by adrianN on Wednesday October 20, 2021 @01:57AM (#28927265)
No resource is truly finite except for energy, so there are upper bounds for the cost of "finite" resources. Pretty much all things that we dig out of the ground don't leave the planet when we're done with them, they just get diluted. So the cost of throwing it away is upper bounded by the cost of extracting the material from a dilute source, e.g. the ocean. That's usually prohibitively expensive.
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