"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.

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.

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.

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.

big oil's about to start yet another denialism campaigh

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.

tl;dr:

Rub them on a big piece of carpet.

But aren't used batteries perfect for grid energy storage?

"But but but! What about landfills? What lame excuse will I make up now that my delusions about batteries filling up landfills has been exposed?" 😭 🫏

This is still good and should be looked at seriously to recover the lithium already in circulation, but I can't help but feel like this is coming at the end of lithium as a battery material. Sodium batteries seem posed to supplant it in the near future.