Of course, we're all going to live in an EV nirvana so there's no need to read this paper.

[NNadir]

22. Really? Problem solved then? I guess the authors of this paper are nowhere near as wise...

...as the guy who rebuilt 500 Priuses on a planet with over a billion cars:

Pyrometallurgical Technology in the Recycling of a Spent Lithium Ion Battery: Evolution and the Challenge. ( Mingxian Zhou, Bang Li, Jia Li, and Zhenming Xu, ACS ES&T Engineering 2021 1 (10), 1369-1382)

I'm sure that the same people who declared Elon Musk "green," are absolutely certain of the "green" environmental policies of wildcat "recycler" in "just one little company."

I'm sure the people praising this guy or woman in "just one little company" looked at the companies processes and they really, really, really care how the guy handles solvents, waste plastic and all the other stuff in the batteries.

Are all the world's lithium batteries being recycled as a result, or do we just have apocryphal bullshit about some wild cat somewhere doing god knows what with fairly dangerous materials? Is this received wisdom, or are there any process details?

Maybe someone should write to the authors of the paper cited in the OP and let them know their concerns expressed in their paper are invalid because some guy somewhere, just one company, has recycled 500 Priuses.

You know, I could probably recycle fuel oil in my garage. Would that be "green?"

The people who wrote the paper above in this post, the referenced paper from the primary scientific literature are referring to high temperatures.

Here's a graphic from the paper of what they call a typical lithium battery recycling furnace.



Here's a description of just one of many processes described:

Nitration roasting is also a low-temperature and highly selective roasting technology. Peng et al. (63) proposed the “nitration-roasting-leaching” process based on sulfation roasting. First, the SLIBs were nitrated to convert the metal components into the corresponding nitrates. Then the mixed nitrates were calcined at 250 °C for 1 h to obtain insoluble transition-metal oxides, whereas lithium remained as a nitrate due to its high decomposition temperature (∼600 °C). (64) Finally, the roasted products were separated by a water-leaching process. Some nitrogen oxides may be produced during this process, which can be recycled into nitric acid by a pressurized acid adsorption, oxidant, or catalyst. (65,66)

Compared to direct roasting, additive-assisted roasting technology has a high selectivity of Li. What’s more, the reaction temperature of this technology is generally lower than the atmosphere-assisted roasting process, which can reduce costs. In addition, because of the high-temperature environment, the reaction rate of the additive roasting method is higher than that of hydrometallurgy, which is a benefit to a large-scale disposal of SLIBs. However, this technology may risk toxic and harmful gas emissions (Cl2, NOx, SOx). These gas products may corrode the instrument and require a subsequent treatment to eliminate its environmental impact.

I'm sure, of course, that in lieu of charcoal, we could always put mirrors on a few hundred square miles of desert and recycle batteries for two to four hours a day in the nitrate roasting process.

That would be "green" wouldn't it?

This of course is the sick mentality of handwaving in lieu of understanding chemical engineering and energy engineering. How many solar thermal plants are their in the world as the Ivanpah solar aerial bird fryer? How many batteries are recycled using them? 500? 1000?

I really, really, really, really, really, really don't need a high school student's lesson on how batteries work. The scientific literature is littered with descriptions; Google scholar reports over 80,000 papers on the topic of recycling lithium batteries, many of them with detailed descriptions of their design and content, the latter not always known because some of the chemistry of electrolytes in particular are proprietary.

One size fits all though, right?

One really can't open any journal involved in industrial processes and their environmental impact without being presented with two or three, sometimes way more, papers on the subject of lithium batteries and recycling.

That's all wonderful, but they aren't recycled on any scale that has shut the cobalt mines in the Congo region. Or are they?

The cost of of so called "renewable energy" is inherently dependent on redundancy even if the assholes hyping say so called "renewable energy is "cheap." The cost of redundancy is both economic and environmental. It is a material waste to require two systems to do what one can do reliably. This is why Denmark and Germany have the highest electricity prices in the OECD.

There is also a moral cost to batteries, not that the people hyping them give a rat's ass.

To repeat: A battery is a device that wastes energy (2nd law of thermodynamics) and thus adds both cost and environmental impact to systems requiring them. That's why they have failed to address climate change, miserably, at a cost of trillions of dollars, and why, despite half a century of hype, a major glacier in Antarctica - which doesn't give a rat's ass about a wild cat Prius battery recycler - is nearing collapse, probably before this decade is out.

Couldn't care less?

It's late 2021. We broke 416 ppm concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere this week, as we surge toward 422 next April or May. Doesn't anyone ever get tired of this shit? I've been hearing it for almost half a century myself. I'm tired of it, even if the people chanting this happy talk aren't tired of it.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.