With a major push from business and world leaders to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and focus instead on more sustainable technologies such as lithium-ion batteries, questions have been raised about what happens once these batteries stop being usable.
Electronic waste (e-waste) is an issue that would increase as the scale of mass-electrification increases, as it is currently a major part of the life cycle of electronics.
Raw materials such as lithium are harvested, toll processing technologies are used to refine them into electronic components and they are assembled into devices that typically cannot be opened without specialist tools.
Once this device stops being used, there is a tremendous risk that it gets thrown away, which not only contributes to a growing issue of electronic waste but it means that incredibly valuable metals and minerals are lost to landfill.
However, there are alternatives to creating hazardous toxic landfills, which involve sophisticated recycling systems.
There are generally three ways to recycle batteries, which involve discharging and dismantling the packs, before either smelting them under extreme heat, shredding and separating the individual materials, or using chemical methods to dissolve the metals before recovering them.
Given the expense and difficulty in extracting raw lithium through brines and mining, recycling batteries is incredibly efficient, and often leads to further benefits if a smart device containing a lithium-ion battery is recycled at the same time.
According to data by the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States, significant quantities of copper, silver, gold and palladium can be recovered in addition to the materials in the battery.