this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2026
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Electric Vehicles

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Electric Vehicles are a key part of our tomorrow and how we get there. If we can get all the fossil fuel vehicles off our roads, out of our seas and out of our skies, we'll have a much better environment. This community is where we discuss the various different vehicles and news stories regarding electric transportation.


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For some electric vehicle batteries, it costs more to recycle them than they're worth. That creates all kinds of problems, which a new Colorado law aims to solve.

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[โ€“] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 day ago (6 children)

From what i have seen lithium battery packs just get dumped into huge shredders in one piece and turned into a big soup. From there everything gets physically and chemically separated. But maybe that isnt the most efficient way yeah.

[โ€“] Sir_Ious@feddit.org 6 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I'm not a chemist, but I've heard that a lot of substances (e.g. rare earths) are engineered into products in a way that makes them next to impossible to recycle. Which is bad because... it's in their name. ๐Ÿค”

[โ€“] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 6 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

Which is bad because... it's in their name

They're not actually rare, the name is historical.

[โ€“] Sir_Ious@feddit.org 6 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Rare isn't a binary quality, true. But the name isn't meaningless either. They're rare enough that superpowers compete over mining sites.

[โ€“] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 3 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

To be pedantic, rich deposits of them are reasonably rare. But that's mostly due to capitalism making it unviable to process lower concentration deposits. The elements are otherwise pretty common.

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