Prediction Open · timeframe Mar 2044
Cotton: Recycled lithium content will reach 80% to 90% in decades
“More and more recycling infrastructure gets built. We get closer and closer and migrate from that less than one percent to 80 to 90%, just like what lead has shown us. And it's really only a couple decades of recycling, so it'll happen fairly quickly.”
Opinion
Cotton: Traditional battery smelters are dangerous, unsafe hellscapes
“You know, having the desire to understand, well, what happens to these batteries, I went to smelters, and they're a hellscape. It's very dangerous. You've got lead dust all over the floor. You've got a bunch of people wearing hot suits literally chucking batte…”
Insight
Cotton: Processes generating more waste than recovered material aren't true recycling
“When you produce many multiples more waste and pollution than the valuable materials that are recovered, is it really even recycling is the way we look at it.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Dec 2030
Cotton: Global Battery Recycling Market Will Reach $25 Billion by 2030
“And if you look at the global lithium battery recycling market, it's already today roughly a five billion dollar industry, And we expect it to grow by about five-fold just in the coming few years to the end of the decade to nearly twenty-five billion dollars.”
Assertion Contradicted
Cotton: Under 1% of materials in new lithium batteries are recycled
“And if you contrast that today to a new lithium battery that you get regardless of the application, whether it's an EV or a piece of consumer electronics, et cetera that has under one percent of the recycled lithium, nickel, or cobalt in that new battery. It a…”
Assertion Partly supported
Cotton: Pyrometallurgy burns or loses lithium into unrecoverable slag
“That really is high temperature, fossil fuels based and it doesn't recover all the materials. For example, in lithium recycling you burn the lithium or you lose what lithium you don't burn into what's called slag, which is a solid waste stream that you can't r…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cotton: Hydrometallurgy requires massive chemical inputs and costly waste management
“And it's not really great when it comes to the environment or worker safety. You've got train loads of chemicals coming in. So the economics of, ah, managing that, storing those in massive tank farms, and then spending tens of millions of dollars to run a tras…”
Prediction Open · timeframe Dec 2030
Cotton: 10 Million Tons of Battery Scrap and Dead Cells Available by 2030
“And you know, from now until the end of the decade we think there's an estimated ten million tons or so of combined scrap material and end of life batteries that are really going to be ready to be recycled.”
Assertion Contradicted
AquaMetals CEO: Operating commercial-scale hydrometallurgical recycling is in China
“The hydro processes that are up and running at any scale are happening in China.”
Assertion Supported
Cotton: Smelting is already among the top 10 most pollutive global industries
“And that will create what is already one of the top 10 most pollutive industries in the world smelting times 10.”
Assertion Supported
Gigafactory Scrap Can Reach 10% to 15% of Total Battery Production
“And so as battery components and these cathode, what are called cathode materials are cut and formed, a significant amount of that scrap is produced, and sometimes that's as high as 10 to 15% of the entire production of the plant.”
Assertion Supported
Cotton: New lead-acid batteries contain 80% to 90% recycled metal
“The amount of metal in that battery that came from a recycled source is about 80 to 90%.”
Assertion Supported
Cotton: Most early data center backup power systems were lead-acid based
“Most battery energy storage systems, particularly for general data centers, like think of where Netflix is hosted and anything you do on the web, we're all lead acid based.”
