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.
Yeah ive played rimworld too.
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.
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
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.
But I presume a new battery also only need 10% lithium?
This is going to make it even less of a reason for companies to invest in sodium batteries
“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
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.
Can these not be used for grid storage?
Not forever
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.
Jeremy Clarkson rims goats. Fuckin tail-lifter.
He’s an alcoholic Boomer comedian and opines on things he has no clue about.
What did I miss?
Nothing. Lemmy being edgy teens.
Edgy leftist teens in particular
you don’t have to be a leftist to hate a filthy child abuser like Jeremy Clarkson… oh wait I forgot… right wing nutjobs are no longer against child abuse. they now publicly defend raping children. nvm.
I just searched for child abuse allegations against Jeremy Clarkson and I’m coming up empty. Can you point me at something concrete?
just going to link all the articles about his scummy behavior.
https://metro.co.uk/2025/10/27/jeremy-clarkson-makes-shocking-joke-hates-litterers-racists-paedophiles-24535369/amp/ – jokes about abusing kids and shooting people in the head for misdemeanor crimes without trial.
https://iol.co.za/motoring/industry-news/2013-05-09-jeremy-clarkson-sparks-outrage-again/ – mocking the rape of children
https://www.channel4.com/news/jeremy-clarkson-bbc-most-infamous-moments-timeline – a fun little overview some of his biggest hits.
2023 tweet sent by Jeremy Clarkson where he had suggested Meghan Markle be paraded naked through the streets (as depicted in a scene in Game of Thrones), saying he “didn’t see anything wrong” with it.
lots of tweets from Clarkson about doing beastiality and mocking victims of rape… gross stuff.
and while he isn’t in the unredacted parts of the Epstein files… he has a lot of friends and associates in those files. and he only distanced himself from them after being called out for not distancing himself from them. – and we all know… those who support pedophiles tend to later be outed as pedophiles.
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.
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.
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.
That’s great and all, but not all batteries need lithium. When another battery technology gets mature enough to surpass lithium based batteries, then we’ll still be stuck on old tech cause the government is subsiding it.
This also reduces the incentive for making more lithium efficient batteries.
Subsidies can help, but they need to be more generalized so they don’t create issues moving past current tech. Heck, look at how much trouble we’re having getting past oil, that’s a perfect example.
Under modern physics, Lithium is pretty much the best possible chemical to build batteries out of. Anything else that might be better won’t be a chemical battery, and it’s not like there’s any reason to suspect some new magic thing will be created like a pocket-size fusion reactor that will make chemical batteries totally obsolete any time soon. Decades more of lithium batteries being relevant are as close to guaranteed as can be.
Sodium batteries? Of course it depends on their use a bit.
Those are not “better” batteries chemically or electrically. They are just cheaper and don’t use lithium which is considered a feature.
Sodium batteries are cheaper, safer, and last longer than lithium batteries. That’s exactly what you want for grid-scale energy storage. So yes, sodium IS better than lithium for grid-scale energy storage
They are also fine for cars that don’t need to have 1000km of range, for some stupid reason.
And you can even mix-and-match cells of both types in a vehicle to better fit a target demographic. It’s not simply one or the other.
That being said, it’s better to have a car with a 200 mile range sodium battery and a small range extender for that 2-4 times per year trip
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.
That’s just the US and Canada.
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.
