“Soon” is in 10 years:
Recent breakthroughs in recycling, together with a spate of technological improvements, mean that within a decade or so most of the global demand for raw materials to build new batteries could be met by recycling old ones.
Some believe that no additional mining will be required in 25 years, which sounds quite optimistic.
This will be caused by a combination of better recycling and continuing advances in battery chemistry, which boosts the energy density of cells so that batteries can be made with fewer raw materials. This, RMI believes, might see mineral extraction for batteries being avoided altogether by 2050.
Curious what mining vs recycling will do to the personal vehicle economy. If new vehicles depend primarily recycled materials (in that there’s a substantial cost cliff between mined and recycled), we may hit some global max quantity of vehicles in that new cars require old cars to be recycled. So it’s not that we can’t make additional vehicles, they’ll just be much more expensive.
Curious if that’ll lower per capita car ownership. People give up multiple cars per family for the benefit of cheaper “fuel” compared to ICE vehicles which have no global material shortage suppressing their manufacture.