Mildly dramatized article in Wired Magazine by Sabrina Weiss about the need to step up our game on recycling all those fancy new traction batteries: The World Needs to Crack Battery Recycling, Fast | WIRED UK "electric vehicles don’t emit any carbon dioxide when being driven, but their rechargeable batteries are causing environmental and social concerns of their own. They contain scarce and expensive metals. And once the batteries are past their prime, they are tough to recycle."
and not only car batteries. we need to step up recycling of everything, but probably won't, at least not until it is cataclysmic, and then it's too late, like everything else we've done to ourselves
Yeah we can’t even recycle glass and plastics at anywhere near a reasonable rate because reasons Batteries at least have a strong secondary market, remember REUSE is more important than recycling
agreed, but at some point, they're toast? i'm no expert. i sometimes wonder, when rinsing out plastic/glass/metal how much energy i'm using.
Especially when your locality supposedly doesn’t have a “market “ Nearly 100% of plastic can be converted to fuel (98% efficient with minimal pollution) Perhaps we need a never to landfill attitude like Europe?
That would be nice, I just read an article about old toxic landfill problems in maine. I think what we need is a new way of producing less problematic packaging and the like
In the early 80’s during the NY garbage gate crisis there was talk of plastic packaging bans, then recycling was pushed by the industry and we doubled down
If you make your own cells, you have plenty of high quality feedstock for recycling processes. Bob Wilson
Yes around 1990 was when environmentalists first made a big stink about plastics. The American Plastics Council was formed, as an industry group. I got involved doing some R&D on recycling options. At the time, climate change was on the "back burner" but styrofoam in particular was a hot button concern. My recollection part of what happened, was the Gulf War in 1991 sucked the "air out of the room" and that sort of took public interest away from the plastics issue. Enviro groups hit the reset button and started focus more on peak oil and climate change. Another (probably) good thing was more focus on No-1 Plastic (PET -polyester) which is very recyclable. I know in South Jersey we had a PET recycling plant a long time ago...need lots more of those probably. Economics is issue, By the time you spend money collecting the materials., cleaning etc, the cost exceeds the profit that can be made. So it has always an area where gov't funding or subsidy or mandates are needed to make it happen, Typically the way US gov't handles it, they like to allow mom and pop small industry develop to solve the problem, failing that then regs are developed to force the cost on industry. But the historic priority in USA is to allow small industry to handle it first.
we had the same at some point. business pacs killed it. and even on the ballot, the people were scared off by big money advertising. we're lucky to have gotten a deposit bill passed, but even that got exemptions.