This is going to make it even less of a reason for companies to invest in sodium batteries
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.
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.
Yeah ive played rimworld too.
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
But I presume a new battery also only need 10% lithium?
Exactly.
The whole reason why lithium is such a good material for cathodes in car batteries is because of its very low mass per cation. So for a Lithium Iron Phosphate battery, the the cathode material is LiFePO4, where the Lithium itself is only 4.4% of the overall mass of the cathode.
So it’s important to remember that although the lithium constitutes a small amount of the total mass of a battery, that swings both ways so that not much is actually needed to build the next battery out of recycled materials.
Right, I don’t understand their point. Recycling 90% of a battery is still 90% of a new battery.
It also assumes that we’d still using the same amount of lithium when we get to a point that it’s not so cheap they put it in disposable cigarettes.
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.
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.
is it a rant if you’re just stating facts?
both haha
Oil companies are today what the Catholic church were to science in the middle ages.
But they’re not. They’re investing heavily in renewables as well so they can be the ones profiting from it.
“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.
black mass
Pretty metal
Lithium can be a pretty metal, but I’m not sure it looks its best in this state.
HAIL SATAN
WORSHIP DOOM
Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerer of death’s constructionBrutal
But still lithe.
seems like a significant breakthrough
Dumb question… how are they burning them? I thought controlling lithium battery fires was difficult?
They are hard to put out, but if you want them to burn all you really need is a safe place to do it. So in a big crucible with some type of fume extraction so they aren’t crazy polluting the air. As long as the heat has somewhere safe to go and there isn’t anything else to catch on fire, burning things is easy.
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.
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.
For a second here, I thought Jerry’s channel had taken on a new format. I realize, now, this is referring to a materials part of the recycling process.
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.
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.
The batteries don’t last forever, eventually, they need to be dealt with somehow.
Also grid storage doesn’t have the sort of deep, rapid discharge/charge cycles that EVs go through. Once an EV battery is no good in the car, it still has about 80% of it’s useable capacity left. Meaning, there will always be a need for “new” EV batteries, but grid storage would saturate and leave surplus batteries. Not to mention, as the grid storage batteries fall out of their useful life for that purpose, they can be recycled into new EV batteries and begin the cycle anew.
Not if they are not holding energy any more.
We recover 99% of lead from car batteries. The same lead is used over and over.
Lead is much easier to purify than lithium.
Because we really have not tried.
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.
Lithium is pretty much the best possible chemical to build batteries out of.
Depends on how you define “best”. Likely the highest possible short-term energy density, yes, but that isn’t the only thing we might want out of a battery. “Doesn’t catch fire” is one of the areas where the highest-energy lithium battery chemistries are far from the best, for instance.
Lithium’s energy density is largely the cause of its flammability - if you accept density and capacity comparable to another battery chemistry, you can get it down to a comparable fire risk, even if there’s not much point bothering.
Lithium is pretty much the best possible chemical to build batteries out of.
Nickel iron batteries, while heavier and less energy dense have virtually infinite lifespan. As such it is a far better battery for home power walls than lithium.
Me when different solutions are optimal for different goals
Except nickel is fairly rare, driving up the costs. Sodium isn’t
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 battery performance is better in the cold.
Currently some sodium battery products are out in the market and aren’t appreciably cheaper yet and the answer to ‘why’ was ‘cold weather performance’.
Cheaper is a kind of better.
Cheap, high longevity, high capacity. You can’t have all three.
What’s better depends on application. I don’t want a cheap battery in my car if I only get 80 miles on a charge.
I don’t want a cheap battery in my car if I only get 80 miles on a charge.
you can get as much range as you want with just making the battery bigger.
What’s better depends on application
Go reread the thread. You’re (hopefully unintentionally) arguing against using sodium batteries for grid storage because lithuim has more energy density.
Cost, high longevity, and heat tolerance are way more important for grid storage than energy density. Sodium batteries are perfect for that, and were poised to start being supplied for that application until the price of lithium tanked at the start of the year.
Also, the sodium batteries that are (and were) about to go to market have enough energy density that manufacturers were considering adding them to cars by mixing and matching sodium and lithium cells in varying ratios to match various use cases. The two chemistries aren’t mutually exclusive in any field
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
That’s great for grid storage. Maybe one day for even EV use, emphasis on maybe. But you’ll never have a cell phone with a sodium battery
But you’ll never have a cell phone with a sodium battery.
This may be the only downside. The new sodium-ion battery weighs 350g (about 12.3 oz.), which is about 1.5 times heavier than an equivalent lithium-ion battery.
And that’s why I said it’s not happening. These batteries are far too heavy for cell phones. That’s an increase in weight I would gladly accept, but I don’t expect it to catch on.
Most of the weight in a phone is from the battery so to get an idea find a second cellphone and hold it with yours and that is the new weight. Ironically my cellphone is only 170g. Meaning that just the battery from your article is 2x the weight of my phone. I would gladly carry that for the increased battery life alone, but many will not.
Hope I’m wrong though and we do adopt it, or maybe they figure out how to make these batteries even lighter.
That day is already today. They need better density for digital devices, probably, but with all these advancements, who knows.
Kickstarting new infrastructure is one place government money tends to work well. You can always phase out the subsidies and there is an argument that battery tech benefited from a feedback loop (used in phones until infra and tech was cheap enough for cars+) and something needs to kickstart that for their recycling, government stepping in to start that loop isn’t uncommon or as terrible as you seem to be making it out
How is that the perfect example?
Shouldn’t it open up the question “why do these subsidies still exist and can we phase them out” not “subsidies are bad”?
I’d rather we get rid of oil subsidies first
Ahh… “rather” reads as a point contrasted to the comment? So what are you expecting comes after questioning why the oil subsidies still exist?
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.
That’s just the US and Canada.
In the USA. Us Europeans are happily treading toward carbon neutrality, even more since the cheetos’ fun war with Iran.
tl;dr:
Rub them on a big piece of carpet.
I remember reading another article that said that their incinerated sewage waste had more gold per ton than their highest yielding mines.
Can these not be used for grid storage?
Not forever
Terrific. But, I suppose it won’t happen at scale until it’s cheaper than mining.
Because money is everything, and our environment is replaceable. /s
But aren’t used batteries perfect for grid energy storage?
Not forever
“But but but! What about landfills? What lame excuse will I make up now that my delusions about batteries filling up landfills has been exposed?” 😭 🫏
F150 metals grow on trees!
This is still good and should be looked at seriously to recover the lithium already in circulation, but I can’t help but feel like this is coming at the end of lithium as a battery material. Sodium batteries seem posed to supplant it in the near future.
Sodium batteries aren’t seriously expected by anyone to supplant Lithium ones. The two things Sodium can theoretically do better than Lithium are being cheaper as a raw material, and working well at low temperatures, but it’s always going to be heavier and larger for a given capacity. Most applications for batteries care about their size and weight, and so the extra cost of Lithium will be worth paying.
Most applications for batteries care about their size and weight
Actually, one of main applications for batteries in the near-to-medium future is gonna be grid storage to supplement the explosive growth of renewables, and home backups to make the grid more distributed and replace diesel/gas generators during blackouts. For those purposes you don’t really care about the size, really don’t care about the weight, and a cheaper, more stable, less fire-prone chemistry suddenly becomes very appealing.
I agree with you that lithium is not going anywhere for a while, it’s the best fit for many applications like EVs, drones, etc. But I wouldn’t be surprised if its share in the battery market drops significantly over the next 10-15 years.
it’s always going to be heavier and larger for a given capacity.
That assumes research has stopped on sodium battery chemistry.
Chemically, Sodium and Lithium are very similar, so any improvement that applies to one should be pretty applicable to the other. That’s actually one of the main strengths of Sodium batteries - most of the research that’s already gone into making Lithium batteries can be reapplied with minor tweaks. However, Sodium is inherently larger and heavier than Lithium, with fewer atoms fitting into the same space and those atoms weighing more. If research for Sodium batteries catches up with Lithium ones, they’ll still be worse just because of that, and at that point, research would get easier gains from improving Lithium batteries than Sodium ones.
You are correct, and the critical number is that sodium is over 3 times as massive as equivalent lithium.
But to keep in perspective, we are talking about an element that’s only about 5-7% of a pack, so theoretically you could maybe get to only 10-15% more massive as a penalty for swapping out lithium. Which is some applications is still unacceptable,but broadly we have seen a lot of accepting that same tradeoff going from NMC to LFP…
You are assuming there will not be different sodium compounds.
Already, sodium chemistry works better in cold, and sodium batteries can charge faster.
Yes I am, because that’s a safe assumption, just like assuming gravity will keep working. We’d need to discover new physics to make Lithium and Sodium plausibly form different compounds as our current understanding of physics predicts them to behave nearly the same. At this point in time, there’s nothing to indicate there’s anything wrong with that part of physics.
There are improvements but physics and chemistry kick in at some point. I don’t know enough to presume where that point is, but you seem to be presuming that the limits for sodium will be better than lithium and I’m not seeing any evidence provided, just faith. May as well work with the reality we have while we see how that pans out. Like someone else said, we recycle a lot of lead from lead batteries, we didn’t stop when lithium batteries came along
