The raw materials are certainly valuable enough to be worth recycling, assuming it's not terribly hard to separate them back out from each other.
But suppose we never figure out a good way to recycle these batteries, and we just have to throw them all in a landfill and keep making new ones. Is that actually so terrible? There's nothing toxic in a typical li-ion battery, so basically we just have inert materials that were taken from the ground being put back in the ground. Mining for nickel/cobalt/lithium is not great for the environment, but the effect is pretty localized, so a "disposable battery future" is probably still highly preferable over the fossil fuel status quo where the entire planet is fucked.
>But suppose we never figure out a good way to recycle these batteries, and we just have to throw them all in a landfill and keep making new ones. Is that actually so terrible?
I mean... yea?
I don't know but I look back to the 2006 Jeep Wrangler being almost entirely recyclable steel and had an effective life of 40+ years if taken care of. Then I look to new cars using composites and lithium that WILL go into a landfill 20 years or less because they're just not fixable in the same way, it's cheaper to write off of an insurance claim than to fix.
It almost seems to me there is no free lunch, but that people like new and shiny and the company with all the tech is going to be popular with tech people.
In its lifetime, that Jeep will dump 100+ tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, which spreads over the entire planet and is near-impossible to concentrate again. The impact of disposal of the car itself - a couple of tons of solids in a particular place - is not even close.
And if we're going to talk about people's irrational thought patterns about the environment... I nominate the idea that landfills matter more than atmosphere dumping, which seems to be based on the fact that landfills are more visible.
Nowhere in your analysis is the fact that the raw materials for these cars have to be mined and refined in a way that currently requires the burning of fossil fuels. It is not just the disposal of the materials themselves that is an issue.
But suppose we never figure out a good way to recycle these batteries, and we just have to throw them all in a landfill and keep making new ones. Is that actually so terrible? There's nothing toxic in a typical li-ion battery, so basically we just have inert materials that were taken from the ground being put back in the ground. Mining for nickel/cobalt/lithium is not great for the environment, but the effect is pretty localized, so a "disposable battery future" is probably still highly preferable over the fossil fuel status quo where the entire planet is fucked.