Battery Recyclability Debate

It's pretty much a non issue. Battery recycling is going to be a great business once currently produced batteries start reaching their rather long end of life. We're in a weird situation right now where we are producing vastly more than just a few years ago so the recycling market is lagging the production market by about 10-15 years or so. However, lithium is easily recovered and the incentives for recovering it are very high given how scarce and expensive this stuff is.Solar recyc

Yes, batteries are getting better at such a rate that you can recycle old batteries at end of life, lose 10% of the material in that process and build a new battery with new tech and less material that is better than the original.The resource extraction issue is more than these are so useful we're going to build an ever growing amount of them.Luckily they're made from widely available materials, with even more widely available substitutions possible e.g sodium batteries.

Not really. Batteries like AAA are already being recycled because it makes economical sense. In fact thieves steal it and need vigilance.You are confused with "electrical components" that are mostly plastic, very hard to disassemble and not worth it economically.A Tesla battery cost over $6000. Materials like Cobalt or Lithium are worth a lot in a concentrated form, much easier than extracting it from the mine. As technology improves, the metals in those batteries are worth more.

EV batteries aren't disposed of, they're reused as stationary storage, then recycled, with over 97% of the raw materials recoverable to put into new batteries as of 2021. Redwood Materials recycles over 60 tons of them per day, and has another facility opening in 2023 that can handle an additional 125,000 tons per year. The materials are too valuable to throw out, so a market for reusing and recycling them has existed as long as li-ion electric cars have existed.

Are they?Old lead battery are highly recyclable but AFAIK the type used in EV's (and in many electronic devices such as laptops and phones) such as Li-Ion are not (easily) recyclable right now.Hopefully by the time discarded batteries will increase in number there will be solutions, but right now there are only some "pilot" plants/technologies, see:https://www.bbc.com&#x

Do they recycle all of a lithium ion battery?

That's the claim, not proven. In reality, very little batteries are recycled and we recover very little of the materials.https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/lithium-costs-a-lot-...

Is there any way to reclaim the resources in a "used up" battery to reintroduce them to the production chain?

Yes, there are. Tesla just announced building a recycling facility. In Germany, there are also active recycling companies. Old batteries have valuable resources, so there is a large incentive of recycling - as soon as large scale supply of dead batteries is available, large scale recycling will be done. But most batteries in current electric cars will live for quite some time before they need recycling.

Not sure what you mean exactly, but lead acid battery recycling is something like 95% effective in terms of what is recovered, and lead can be easily recycled multiple times. Lithium being more expensive is also well known for being able to be recycled.