Most batteries beyond laptop size have significant value once they are 'used'. Most retain 20-90% of their original capacity, meaning they can live on in grid storage which has relatively insignificant size limitations.

Most of the new capacity is for large applications (cars) which means low battery type diversity, and this high reusablity due to consistency and of course high market-value. Quite a few businesses will pop up to create this solutions as the increase of batteries make it through their first life.

This logic is flawed because not all environmental issues are the same priority.

If you believe climate change is the biggest environmental issue, batteries could be significantly "dirtier" overall than alternatives as long as they contribute less to C02.

The parent whose logic you criticised neither said nor implied that batteries are not worth pursuing.

I read it as batteries may be worth pursuing, and if so let's make them clean. That's a proposition which seems difficult to dispute.

Maybe you are right but I think it’s worth thinking about these issues before jumping to a solution that may turn out to cause other problems. For example it may make sense to have some kinds of standards for recyclability.

We have along history of doing one thing to fix another thing and causing lot of other problems.

Lithium will be very valuable and motivate recycling for quite a wile. I don't think this will be a problem, certainly not more than the current disposal pipeline for ICE cars.

There was no such problem with lead-acid batteries, so I don't there will ever be with li-ion.

The difference is that a bunch of trinkets have lithium batteries in them and are very difficult to remove, whereas it's mostly vehicles that use lead acid batteries and they're designed to be easily removed. Also you tend to replace lead acid batteries and continue to use the product while with lithium you tend to throw out the product when the battery is dead. This combination makes recycling much more difficult, although I'm sure you'll be able to catch most of this with general electronics recycling.

Well nobody tried to use lead-acid batteries for storage of anything on the significance of grid base-load and replacing a huge chunk of transportation energy capacity.

For decades we have used lead-acid batteries in close to every backup power solution of any size, plus at least one lead-acid battery per vehicle. Of course we expect lithium-ion to surpass lead-acid in market size and number of deployed batteries, but the amount of lead-acid batteries in the world is nothing to sneeze at either.

Lead is stupidly easy to recycle. There are videos of people doing it on streetcorners in india. Lithium, not so much.

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