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this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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Batteries used to kinda suck, and there are still issues Like weight and scarce minerals
Rare earths are not actually rare. No one mined these metals until recently.
Also degraded batteries can be reprocessed into fresh batteries again, we will only need to mine a lot of them when growing, once the batteries are made we don't need to mine as much.
Given inefficiency you need 10% of virgin materials to make a new one, and there are batteries that don't end up in the recycling stream
It still means every gram of the materials are yielding essentially 10x of use. And when we make these huge batteries it's easier to get them back to the recycling stream since we can easily make that the only way you dispose of them.
Fundamentally as long ad the atoms still exist they should be theoritically recoverable but the last percent is gonna be harder than the first 99%
Materials Recycling needs to be a major research focus
We need a fuck ton of the minerals, not just rare earths but nickel and sometimes cobalt