House: Reaching a fully circular battery economy will take 50 years
Kurt House · The great rush for battery metals · Apr 21, 2022 · at 46:05
Kurt House, CEO of KoBold Metals, explains why recycling cannot replace virgin metal mining in the near term despite high theoretical recyclability.
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“We can achieve 90, 98, 99% recycling rates on these, on, on these batteries, and over time, we'll get to the point where we do not have to mine them which is really, really exciting. But that will take more than a generation, unfortunately. We need a lot more materials in the system now. You can't recycle metal until you have it, right? And so we need to get enough material, metal, metal into the system that we can get to sort of a steady state, you know, steady state circle circular economy, and that will happen. But it will, you know, it'll take 50 years, maybe.”
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