Why Nostr? What is Njump?
2023-08-16 17:04:59
in reply to

artemist on Nostr: npub168303…af0qg How efficient is this process? The EU has set somewhat aggressive ...

How efficient is this process? The EU has set somewhat aggressive collection ratios in the past and have sometimes not managed to reach them. They are targeting 70% recovery of lithium by 2030 (this includes batteries that are not returned). According to a review paper efficiencies tend to top out at around 90%.

If it's any less than 100% we'll need massive amounts of lithium as cars get bigger. This seems to often come at the expense of indigenous peoples, e.g. Canada is already planning on destroying more Cree land to mine lithium.

My position, and the position of most people I talk to about this, is that battery recycling and more electric cars are necessary, but not sufficient. A lot of this reasoning is described in a whitepaper from UC Davis and various other researchers around the US.

In addition to recycling it's important to improve public transportation, reduce the use of cars in cities, promote e-bikes, and increase density in cities. This would have other positive effects, such as more social mobility (easier to get to jobs and poor people do not have to spend thousands of dollars on a car), more safety, less noise, and lower PM2.5 from tires.
Author Public Key
npub1qgc8hrwvjl70n0dxjx3zhschamcg59makdgser5928wfqszku34srcaa76