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.

If/when we get responsible government back in the US, it would make sense to mandate the recycling. Tax the batteries up front and make sure recyclers have to take them, but subsidize them to make it profitable.

(the hypocrites who complain about socialism or wokeness can pound sand)

EV batteries do seem likely to be dominated by NMC type for the near future, possibly to be supplanted by solid state lithium, lithium/air or even something different. Nonetheless there is a lot of LFP used for EV's - less range but still adequate for a lot of vehicles, with other advantages. Less high value materials means less incentives to recycle. Sodium batteries are starting to enter the picture too. Some - I expect not for EV's - have potential to exceed 100,000 cycles, ie very long lasting as well as benign chemicals. Benign wastes may be more important than recyclability for global abundance of batteries.

I've also read of a way aged NMC batteries can be restored to near their original condition - although that seems to require batteries designed to enable electrolytes to be drained, flushed with a 'conditioner' and replaced.

On 7/15/2026 at 5:43 AM, swansont said:

(the hypocrites who complain about socialism or wokeness can pound sand)

My own view is that with less corruption the fears of bad governance - or of governance itself - diminish. But I do wonder if it will take socialist or at least social democratic tendencies (government for the people? Radical notion!) to advance energy technologies to make an abundant sufficiency for everyone with minimal climate and environmental harms achievable. Such technologies, whilst used at enormous scales, may not be especially profitable - or be suited to cost effective recycling.

I'm very-not an expert but I suspect that for China - that defies the stereotype for dogmatic and corrupt shoot-self-in-foot incompetence usually applied to communist autocracy - the overarching fear for their leadership isn't of foreign influence and invasion but of a deeply dissatisfied citizenry rising up. Raising people out of poverty may be less about ideology and more about pacifying and appeasing, but does appear to be a genuine commitment.

But I think such things, like addressing climate with decarbonising (and legal accountability) and eliminating poverty, seems a legitimate role for government-for-the-people. When eliminating poverty becomes purely a side-effect of appeasing capitalists and perpetual economic growth - from not successfully preventing all tricking down? - that won't be good enough. Like choosing RE and EV's because they are cheaper won't be enough.

We need governance that can have big, overarching roles and goals - like decarbonising, like poverty elimination. Insisting the biggest energy and energy technology companies deliver cheap and abundant - enough for a billion plus people irrespective of commercial profitability - could play a significant role in China's policy making that is absent in other nations.