NPR

EV battery recycling has a math problem

For some electric vehicle batteries, it costs more to recycle them than they're worth. That creates all kinds of problems, which a new Colorado law aims to solve.

Colorado wants to get producers to be responsible for a battery's end-of-life path.

And ensure that valuable minerals from EV batteries get recycled into new batteries (or if the batteries are still good, reuse them for power storage banks).

I do think some kind of pre-paid safe disposal/recycle levy would be worthwhile - necessary even, given that the shift to lower cost batteries without high value materials to recover is ongoing.

But I think something like that needs to apply to fossil fuels - full responsibility for the problem wastes - and much more urgently.

Imposing strong conditions on disposal of batteries or other RE equipment whilst allowing amnesty in perpetuity for fossil fuel wastes - which vastly exceed them in both expected physical quantities per MWh and with greater and harder to manage ongoing harms - would be a mistake.