There are industries developing already in order to recycle Lithium batteries . The idea being that the parts can be reused . Ironically , there's not a huge amount of lithium in each battery . That said , they do contain useful other materials . They beauty of a new industry like this is that recycling gets designed into the product from the start .
If you look at industries like mining , coal fired power stations , oil rigs etc , getting rid of them at the end wasn't really planned for . The renewable industry has an advantage in that they are developing products with abundant materials that are very low maintenance and are very recyclable .
One of the issues is that ev batteries are lasting longer than predicted . Further to that , there are plans to recycle used ev batteries as stationary storage . Apparently even though they lose a bit of capacity over a long period they are still very useful as backup stationary storage . There are plenty of people recycling ev batteries already for various projects including home storage .
Even Tesla is working on this . Their intention is develop a business where they provide a service to recycle their own batteries . A kind of a closed loop system .
