Recycling is so effective that with the little that we're currently doing (not enough batteries to recycle yet), we get more battery out of the recycling process than what went in. Because the battery manufacturing is improving and getting more kWh out of the same input materials than when the battery was originally made, and the difference is bigger than anything lost to the recycling process.
Batteries and renewable energy generation are not like building an economy on fossil fuels, which is a very fragile economy vulnerable to massive spikes in input costs. Batteries and renewable energy are fundamentally anti-inflation devices.
This is why you can't build anything in America anymore.
Batteries don't have rare-earth materials in them. Lithium, nickel, and iron are very plentiful in the US. The "rarest" of materials that might be mined is Cobalt. That, however isn't because it's a hard to find. Rather, cobalt has basically no industrial applications outside of battery production. And, importantly, not all battery chemistries require cobalt, just the nickel manganese cobalt batteries.
Idaho has a cobalt mine that's not currently in operation. The reason is because demand is super low and the artisanal mines in africa are cheaper than spinning up a full industrial mine.
Just want to say this is an entertaining euphemism. It isn’t that labor conditions are poor and work is done by hand, it’s “artisanal mining”.
Cobalt is a part of high speed steel and all kinds of metal alloys that have specialized applications, almost 40% of cobalt is used for metallurgical purposes.
If it's Russia, the biggest colonialist country in the world, using Neo Nazi "PMC", or trying to annex neighboring countries, it's not colonialism, it's "liberation from colonialists".
If it's China doing mass acquisitions of state and private assets, it's not colonialism, it's "development".
If it's a western country doing what ever, it's colonialism lol it's such a dumb propaganda trope.
So the conclusion is that the new western colonialism is actually looking like a pretty good option, and shouldn't have such a bad connotation, perhaps it should be embraced in this new world order no?
Or how about we finally go and accept that both Russia and China are imperialist projects too, just like the US are, and oppose all three?
I think the first step is to start to expose the colonists and imperialists in disguise and start to address them for what they are.
There is not much demand for battery sodium at the moment, the technology is still under development. My point just was that the US is self-sufficient when it comes to sodium, even if the regular rock salt mines go out of order for whatever reason, the ocean offers an effectively endless supply of sodium - and the brine is also pretty toxic to local aquatic life, so desalination providers would be happy if you can help them to get rid of the waste.