That article spends less than 5 words dealing with the...

That article spends less than 5 words dealing with the lepidolite waste. It touches on the number of tonnes of ore processed to produce 1 tonne of LCE and it appears the best case is 120 tonnes.

Based on Dec quarter, PLS processed 982,000 tonnes of ore and produced 176,000 of concentrate at grade of 5.2%. Therefore, 5.58 tonnes of processed ore to 1 tonne of SC5.2%. That being the case, conversion to 1 tonne LCE would require ~8 tonnes of concentrate, thus 5.58 x 8 = 45 tonnes of processed ore to 1 tonne LCE, so roughly, lepidolite mine needs to process 2.67 x more ore to produce 1 tonne LCE.

Again, comparing to PLS Dec quarter, if one works those numbers back to total material mined, waste material from lepidolite mine equates to 21.27 million tonnes, what is the cost of dealing with that waste, oh, that's right, they just ignore it, because its not in the reported numbers, nobody will notice the build up of 85 million tonnes of toxic waste each year, after all, everyone in China must take one for the team.