You know what the richest ore for finding metals for new batteries is? Old batteries. Same applies to solar panels. This is great to see.
this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2026
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Also for aluminum it’s cheaper to recycle aluminum than to produce it from raw ore.
Yeah it takes insane amounts of electricity. There’s an aluminium smelter in NZ with an entire hydroelectric power plant dedicated to it. 13% of the total electricity supply of NZ dedicated to just one smelter.
holy crap that's immense; how do you power concrete production?
Yeah ive played rimworld too.
I believe 10% of a lithium battery is lithium. I mean, it's impressive and I love a closed loop for the life of any component, but this doesn't really solve our need for more lithium. Reduce it yes, but not end the requirement for more extraction
But I presume a new battery also only need 10% lithium?
Right, I don't understand their point. Recycling 90% of a battery is still 90% of a new battery.
It also assumes that we'd still using the same amount of lithium when we get to a point that it's not so cheap they put it in disposable cigarettes.
Exactly.
The whole reason why lithium is such a good material for cathodes in car batteries is because of its very low mass per cation. So for a Lithium Iron Phosphate battery, the the cathode material is LiFePO4, where the Lithium itself is only 4.4% of the overall mass of the cathode.
So it's important to remember that although the lithium constitutes a small amount of the total mass of a battery, that swings both ways so that not much is actually needed to build the next battery out of recycled materials.
Any metal in a car needs mining and extraction.
You would not believe how inefficient mining is for platinum and rhodium in ICE catalytic convertors. The oil and gas industry has really drilled into the heads of people that lithium is evil.
This is going to make it even less of a reason for companies to invest in sodium batteries
They have an entirely different use case.
big oil's about to start yet another denialism campaigh
I just want the fucking oil mafia to burn at sun’s temperature. They are such a fucking obstacle and disgrace to humanity’s development. Same goes for the big pharma. All the suffering just because of greed for a piece of paper with £/₹/$/€ on it.
Ok angry rant over.
Capitalism rewards profit. Imagine basing all aspects of life on profit making. Of course human needs, interests, environment health etc. take up a side-role in such a system.
And they're trying to rent seek wherever and whenever possible. Not too long we will be needing to pay for air.
Oil companies are today what the Catholic church were to science in the middle ages.
But they're not. They're investing heavily in renewables as well so they can be the ones profiting from it.
"The process starts with old batteries being separated and burned to strip away non-metal components. What's left gets crushed into something called black mass. This is essentially a powder packed with recoverable metals. From there, a water-based chemical treatment called hydrometallurgy pulls the lithium out. One clever distinction in this new process is that the recovered lithium hydroxide actually replaces a chemical traditionally used during refining. This cuts the carbon footprint by about 40% compared to older methods."
Article also said that previous methods got about 45% of the lithium from recycling.
seems like a significant breakthrough
Nowhere near the advertised 90% in the title tho
black mass
Pretty metal
HAIL SATAN
WORSHIP DOOM
Lithium can be a pretty metal, but I'm not sure it looks its best in this state.
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Jerry Rigs Everything Video about lithium recycling to black mass.
Recycled lithium uses 70% less energy than virgin freshly mined lithium, and lithium, like aluminum, in infinitely recyclable.
Assholes like Jeremy Clarkson don't get this.
Around the time that MH370 was missing and I was still on Twitter. Clarkson posted a picture from his plane showing oxygen masks down and saying something like i hope we don’t die or something.
I called him out for being insensitive due tonMH370. He replied saying something like I’m on a plane dummy how am I supposed to know, but he was on Twitter from the plane and so did have internet.
That was then the catalyst for me receiving thousands of inboxes and DMs from his stans calling me an idiot for daring to call out JC.
I’ve never liked him since then. Then he punched someone on Top Gear and got fired. Now he’s a moaning farmer, right wing, alcoholic.
Jeremy Clarkson rims goats. Fuckin tail-lifter.
He's an alcoholic Boomer comedian and opines on things he has no clue about.
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Ok it needs to be said. The smart play is to have governments to subsidize this process and build up the raw inventory for lithium. That way, ie (US) could have tons and tons of raw lithium without having to mine it.
Wouldn't it be smarter to use old EV batteries for grid storage?
Why not both? Downcycle the old EV batteries for grid storage, then when they reach the end of useful life, recycle them. We need to resurrect the first 2 R's (Reduce, Reuse) to be able to survive on this planet.
They are listed in order of importance.. reduce first, if you can't, then reuse. If you can't reuse, then recycle.
Problem is, we saw "recycle" and thougt "infinite resources" and ditched the other two.. turns out that most things cant really be recycled, so now it's just landfill all the way
I wish I could remember where I read it, but the focus on just Recycle was encouraged as the main narrative by corporations which didn't want to give up the myth of endless growth.
The batteries don't last forever, eventually, they need to be dealt with somehow.
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Lithium recycling has never been the problem. The problem is most EVs are new, and people aren't buying enough of them, so there isn't enough capacity of old batteries in the system yet for business to profit from building the plants to do the recycling. And now some stupid orange asshole has been sabotaging production, so we're not going to hit that tipping point for decades.
In the USA. Us Europeans are happily treading toward carbon neutrality, even more since the cheetos' fun war with Iran.
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tl;dr:
Rub them on a big piece of carpet.
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