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EV battery recycling has a math problem
(www.npr.org)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2026
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Here's a better way: make them pay a part of the recycling costs. The more complex the recycling process, the higher the costs. This will incentivise engineering things from the end of the lifecycle backwards, making components easier to repair and separate at EOL.
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.
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. 🤔
This is true of a lot of modern materials. Plastics, alloys, and microelectronics. The advancements make them better than anything which would be easily reusable or recoverable, or repairable. But we pay the cost, both in them being disposable instead, and in the forced design of being throwaway and not lasting, so profitable to make this was for the companies.
They're not actually rare, the name is historical.
Rare isn't a binary quality, true. But the name isn't meaningless either. They're rare enough that superpowers compete over mining sites.