> We need to get lithium from 5 to 75%

As long as you store your old batteries (and other lithium containing gadgets), I shouldn't make too much of a difference if you recycle them now or in ten years?

Where and how do we store them safely?

In landfills?

This brings up an aside I've been wondering about for years, when are we going to start mining our old landfills?

We just need more people to accidentally toss their bitcoin keys in the trash! https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/15/uk/bitcoin-trash-landfill...

> Where and how do we store them safely?

You could probably just stick them in a warehouse? Or a specialised landfill that only keeps electronics or batteries. (Most just to keep the overall volume down, so it's more economical to make whatever special arrangements you need to keep everything safe enough.)

Well if we're comparing the recycling of old soda cans to lithium batteries... I had to throw a few old phones away recently. I Googled and found a mobile phone store near me that accepted e-waste for free, so I went a bit out of my way and took the phones there. I was not, however, given a bit of cash for every phone I returned..!

Soda can deposits are far from universal an do not result in free money... they simply refund the deposit that was paid up.

But they do make sure more bottles amd cans get recycled. In practice it creates a whole ecosystem of people collecting amd cashing them in. If we didn't have the deposit, the government would have to pay for that cleanup

Batteries in Norway have a very high recycling rate and large batteries like car starter batteries attract a specific tax (miljø gebyr, environment charge) that assists in funding the recycling operations. Everyone who sells batteries has to be a member of an approved recycling group and be willing to accept for recycling batteries of the same general type even if they did not sell them. So you can dump your old phone batteries in a box at any supermarket.