Large batteries will be recycled almost totally, while small ones, are obviously less likely to be recycled. If you compute number of recycled batteries as a percent of number of batteries results will be far different from the same ratio in kg of lithium. Being careless with phone batteries is totally different than being careless with car batteries…
Not sure if this is exactly right, but if so, that would still make the aggregate effects of carelessness of recycling phones batteries on par with cars:
- 310 million phones in the use [1]
- 280k cars in the US [2]
That means, even if *all* cars in the US were electric, we'd be at about the equivalent of 1.2 billion phones - 3x more. We're a long way off from getting there, so for the time being, I would argue that carelessness with phone batteries, in aggregate, is worse than being careless with cars.
I still agree we should ultimately be talking about kg of lithium, but the analysis would probably say we need to care a lot about phone batteries.
I suppose you mean 280 million cars, and each car batery is like 4500 iPhone batteries, so if there are 3 times more phones than cars, the percent of lithium in phones for a fully electrified car systems would be 3/4500. Perhaps if you suppose phones are rotates 10 times faster than cars, 30/4500 (=0.66 %). This supposes that all car batteries are recycled, and no phone battery would be.
> I suppose you mean 280 million cars, and each car batery is like 4500 iPhone batteries, so if there are 3 times more phones than cars
I mean there are 280k (thousand, not million) cars, and each of those use equivalent of 4500 phone batteries, that gets you to 1.2 billion phone batteries. So even if we were fully electrified, that's a 3x use of batteries by cars than phones.
It’s interesting to see how these dodgy statistics persist, and how one misinterpretation of data in one source can cascade through a chain of citations. It means that someone encountering this kind of stat in the wild has no chance of figuring out whether it’s true without doing the detailed archaeological work you do here.
A question I wonder about is how do you kill these zombie statistics for good? Can debunking pieces ever out-SEO the zombie sources? Or do you need to get corrections into the same places that cited the dodgy stat in the first place?
Really enjoyed this article! I would subscribe to a substack devoted entirely to tracing zombie statistics to their sources and attempting to get them corrected. Anything to make the modern SEO/AI Internet slightly more fact-based would be a boon for our collective brains!
This is similar to the trope that half of all marriages end in divorce. It divides the number of divorces per year by the number of marriages. The trouble with this is that the pool of married people who could possibly divorce is larger than those who married in a given year. They include those married for many different durations. The figure is still quite high, but not 50%.
Just taking my own experience (n=2), my two previous cars (both Nissan Leaf) end of life for their batteries are as power walls. I have 22kWh power wall collecting the solar power generated on my roof, and whilst it isn't the same physical battery as the ones that came out of the Leafs (my 2015 Leaf would have had about 24kWh when new therefore about 20kWh now), 22kWh takes up quite a lot of space and you can imagine it's older batteries.
About 2 of my phones are still in a drawer as backup just in case. My wife hasn't kept any of her old phones. All the others have been recycled through those drop-in bags which send a working phone to someone who doesn't need the latest tech.
I do the same with all removeable batteries - they all go to a special battery bank. This includes laptop batteries because I always strip down laptops to remove the hard disk before sending the rest for recycling - paranoia about identity or information theft.
Human beings sort all the time. We go to the shops and buy a whole lot of things that were once ordered, and jumble them up in the shopping bags. Then we sort them out on arrival at home - some into the fridge, some freezer, some dry goods, some room temperature, some hanging, some on shelves. We then take the ordered stuff from shelves and jumble it up and process it to make delicious meals; and chew it in a jumble and let our guts sort out the fibre from the oils from the carbs from the protein from the water.
It's the most human thing in the world to sort out the waste into different categories - paper and card, plastics, metals, glass, garden compost, batteries and electrical goods, stuff that doesn't have a home (probably landfill).
Maybe 5% of all automotive Li-ion batteries produced have been recycled? The rest are still in cars or in second lives?
I could imagine laptop and phone batteries are not properly recycled as people chuck them in the bin. Even there, most take them to collection points.
Meanwhile, someone just told me yesterday Earth was warmer in the Middle Ages, and the Romans grew wine in Yorkshire. (That last one is sort of true, but more because of expensive logistics than climate).
Die wichtigste Stelle finde ich wie folgt in dem Podcast:
"People tend to interpret and use information in a way that confirms their existing beliefs and preferences. Older individuals who oppose electric cars rely on seemingly credible but often debunked information to justify their opposition. A well-known example is the frequently cited but false claim that only 5% of batteries are recycled. Melin points out that this false figure benefits various interest groups that have a stake in slowing the progress of electric cars:
Researchers: They can argue that more research is needed.
Startups: They can claim there is a significant problem to solve.
Oil and gas industry: They can highlight that electric cars are not yet the perfect solution and thus continue to rely on fossil fuels.
Hydrogen industry: They can argue that hydrogen is the better alternative.
Lead-acid battery industry: They can emphasize that their products remain relevant.
This false figure creates an entire ecosystem of 'motivated reasoning,' where everyone can protect their own interests by holding onto this misinformation. In the end, each interest group feels validated and satisfied, regardless of whether the information is accurate."
I'm really wondering why Hannah easily accepts the CO2e emissions from the nuclear industry but scrutinizes those of batteries.
The nuclear industry manipulated the figures all the way to UNEP. A simple example is that they calculated using regular concrete, but nuclear power plants require special concrete with different strengths and completely different CO2 emissions. And that's just one of many examples!
They Ignore The mining, the risks of Storing, the Risk of Milions of years of nuclear poisened eras... and so on..
Note that the table of recycling in North America mentions phone, laptops, and tablets but it doesn't even mention EVs! That's how outdated and inaccurate that table and the article are. In 2016 there were about 2 million EVs on the road (still a figure too big to ignore in that table). In 2024 the estimate is 40 million. It's like basing the recycling rate of aluminum on how much aluminum foil is recycled while ignoring aluminum cans. Furthermore, since growth of EVs is exponential it is essential to use the latest numbers, not data that is 8 years old.
> That’s also why I will not repeat the false claims in text form, but will instead include them as screenshots that Google and LLMs can’t crawl in the same way.
Excellent as always, Hannah. One other point to be made is that any figures about recycling batteries from 2016 (or whatever, i.e., not the past couple years) are so out-of-date as to be useless anyway. Not only has the total number/mass of lithium-ion batteries vastly increased since 2016 -- nearly all of them certainly not at the end of their life -- but also recycling technologies and companies have proliferated during these past several years.
Next time the first instance of any new technology is made, someone should loudly broadcast that it’s 0 % recycled, ensuring the fossilization of this statistic. They might even succeed in paralyzing its development, so the statistic will actually stay true.
I think their analyses and your critique miss the most important angle. It's not the *number* of batteries that we should be counting, but the mass. It would take 100 or so hearing aid batteries to match one mobile phone battery, and about 4500 iPhone batteries per Tesla Model 3.
Surely we should be counting both: number AND mass. And not just in terms of "recycling" -- as the LEAST desirable and last option of Reduce, Re-use, Recycle.
This includes re-use of ex-EV batteries for example, as static power backup for domestic solar installations, or to store excess power generation (by wind or solar with intermittency problem) to regulate the Smart Grid.
Such Re-use accounts for batteries with the largest mass, in much more useful and efficient ways than materials recovery -- as an end of the line destination.
Thank you for this important article, Hannah! It's frightening how many numbers enter our collective understanding of topics that turn out to be the result of a flimsy or wrong quotation somewhere deep down the rabbit hole. Most probably people pick up any number they can find that supports their narrative, their view of the world, like here: If you have a preconceived notion that batteries are bad at being recycled, you will be less cautious to quote such a stark number that strongly supports your view.
This 5% number is not nothing. It comes from call2recycle.org that releases they recycling data yearly, and their numbers are cited in US Dept. Or Energy reports. However, their data infographic is really confusing and I could not figure out what the latest recycling rate is.
Always appreciate efforts to debunk rogue stats. One note though: ChatGPT has no problem grabbing text from images. I just asked it to summarise the text in your search results image and got the following response back:
The text in the image addresses a common misconception about lithium-ion battery recycling. It claims that one of the most widespread but incorrect “facts” is that only 5% of lithium-ion batteries are recycled, implying that 95% of them end up in landfills. The date provided for this information is January 17, 2024. The source is LinkedIn, with a link to an article titled “The 5% rate and other untruths about battery recycling.”
Hello Hannah, there is a lot of discussion about the environmental impact of (car) batteries vs fossil fuels, but I was wondering if you would have any pointers to credible research (or you have already researched this) comparing the environmental impact (e.g. water use, CO2, use of scarce resources) of batteries (single use alkaline or rechargeable batteries: NiMh or lithium) vs no batteries (e.g. using cabled devices). There are more and more devices which come with batteries while previously they were just cabled (all kinds of IT periphery) and I would like to know whether this is something to "fuss less about if disposed correctly" or that really matters. Thanks!
Large batteries will be recycled almost totally, while small ones, are obviously less likely to be recycled. If you compute number of recycled batteries as a percent of number of batteries results will be far different from the same ratio in kg of lithium. Being careless with phone batteries is totally different than being careless with car batteries…
Elsewhere in the comments, someone states
> about 4500 iPhone batteries per Tesla Model 3
Not sure if this is exactly right, but if so, that would still make the aggregate effects of carelessness of recycling phones batteries on par with cars:
- 310 million phones in the use [1]
- 280k cars in the US [2]
That means, even if *all* cars in the US were electric, we'd be at about the equivalent of 1.2 billion phones - 3x more. We're a long way off from getting there, so for the time being, I would argue that carelessness with phone batteries, in aggregate, is worse than being careless with cars.
I still agree we should ultimately be talking about kg of lithium, but the analysis would probably say we need to care a lot about phone batteries.
[1] https://www.statista.com/topics/2711/us-smartphone-market/#topicOverview
[2] https://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/how-many-cars-are-in-the-us.html#:~:text=In%202022%2C%20there%20were%20283%2C400%2C986,own%20three%20or%20more%20vehicles.
I suppose you mean 280 million cars, and each car batery is like 4500 iPhone batteries, so if there are 3 times more phones than cars, the percent of lithium in phones for a fully electrified car systems would be 3/4500. Perhaps if you suppose phones are rotates 10 times faster than cars, 30/4500 (=0.66 %). This supposes that all car batteries are recycled, and no phone battery would be.
> I suppose you mean 280 million cars, and each car batery is like 4500 iPhone batteries, so if there are 3 times more phones than cars
I mean there are 280k (thousand, not million) cars, and each of those use equivalent of 4500 phone batteries, that gets you to 1.2 billion phone batteries. So even if we were fully electrified, that's a 3x use of batteries by cars than phones.
280k cars where? In Dallas? Man, there is almost one car by person in the US!
https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicles-in-the-united-states-since-1990/
The number is 280k thousands= 280 million
oh doh! embarrassing miscalculation on my part, 280k total should not have passed the sanity check :)
So you are right, electric cars, at scale, will be a much bigger deal than phones.
It’s interesting to see how these dodgy statistics persist, and how one misinterpretation of data in one source can cascade through a chain of citations. It means that someone encountering this kind of stat in the wild has no chance of figuring out whether it’s true without doing the detailed archaeological work you do here.
A question I wonder about is how do you kill these zombie statistics for good? Can debunking pieces ever out-SEO the zombie sources? Or do you need to get corrections into the same places that cited the dodgy stat in the first place?
This is the challenge. I publish with tens of citations, but how do I know those citations are true?
Thank-you to Hannah for writing this article and reminding me to watch my step
5% statistic is a myth, Lithium Georg who lives in a cave and eats 100000000 batteries per day was an outlier and should not have been counted?
Really enjoyed this article! I would subscribe to a substack devoted entirely to tracing zombie statistics to their sources and attempting to get them corrected. Anything to make the modern SEO/AI Internet slightly more fact-based would be a boon for our collective brains!
This is similar to the trope that half of all marriages end in divorce. It divides the number of divorces per year by the number of marriages. The trouble with this is that the pool of married people who could possibly divorce is larger than those who married in a given year. They include those married for many different durations. The figure is still quite high, but not 50%.
Just taking my own experience (n=2), my two previous cars (both Nissan Leaf) end of life for their batteries are as power walls. I have 22kWh power wall collecting the solar power generated on my roof, and whilst it isn't the same physical battery as the ones that came out of the Leafs (my 2015 Leaf would have had about 24kWh when new therefore about 20kWh now), 22kWh takes up quite a lot of space and you can imagine it's older batteries.
About 2 of my phones are still in a drawer as backup just in case. My wife hasn't kept any of her old phones. All the others have been recycled through those drop-in bags which send a working phone to someone who doesn't need the latest tech.
I do the same with all removeable batteries - they all go to a special battery bank. This includes laptop batteries because I always strip down laptops to remove the hard disk before sending the rest for recycling - paranoia about identity or information theft.
Human beings sort all the time. We go to the shops and buy a whole lot of things that were once ordered, and jumble them up in the shopping bags. Then we sort them out on arrival at home - some into the fridge, some freezer, some dry goods, some room temperature, some hanging, some on shelves. We then take the ordered stuff from shelves and jumble it up and process it to make delicious meals; and chew it in a jumble and let our guts sort out the fibre from the oils from the carbs from the protein from the water.
It's the most human thing in the world to sort out the waste into different categories - paper and card, plastics, metals, glass, garden compost, batteries and electrical goods, stuff that doesn't have a home (probably landfill).
Maybe 5% of all automotive Li-ion batteries produced have been recycled? The rest are still in cars or in second lives?
I could imagine laptop and phone batteries are not properly recycled as people chuck them in the bin. Even there, most take them to collection points.
Meanwhile, someone just told me yesterday Earth was warmer in the Middle Ages, and the Romans grew wine in Yorkshire. (That last one is sort of true, but more because of expensive logistics than climate).
And days were shorter in the good old days https://www.iflscience.com/in-2011-a-magnitude-9-0-earthquake-shifted-the-planet-s-axis-and-shortened-earth-s-days-67887#:~:text=spin%20a%20lot%20faster.
Die wichtigste Stelle finde ich wie folgt in dem Podcast:
"People tend to interpret and use information in a way that confirms their existing beliefs and preferences. Older individuals who oppose electric cars rely on seemingly credible but often debunked information to justify their opposition. A well-known example is the frequently cited but false claim that only 5% of batteries are recycled. Melin points out that this false figure benefits various interest groups that have a stake in slowing the progress of electric cars:
Researchers: They can argue that more research is needed.
Startups: They can claim there is a significant problem to solve.
Oil and gas industry: They can highlight that electric cars are not yet the perfect solution and thus continue to rely on fossil fuels.
Hydrogen industry: They can argue that hydrogen is the better alternative.
Lead-acid battery industry: They can emphasize that their products remain relevant.
This false figure creates an entire ecosystem of 'motivated reasoning,' where everyone can protect their own interests by holding onto this misinformation. In the end, each interest group feels validated and satisfied, regardless of whether the information is accurate."
I'm really wondering why Hannah easily accepts the CO2e emissions from the nuclear industry but scrutinizes those of batteries.
The nuclear industry manipulated the figures all the way to UNEP. A simple example is that they calculated using regular concrete, but nuclear power plants require special concrete with different strengths and completely different CO2 emissions. And that's just one of many examples!
They Ignore The mining, the risks of Storing, the Risk of Milions of years of nuclear poisened eras... and so on..
Note that the table of recycling in North America mentions phone, laptops, and tablets but it doesn't even mention EVs! That's how outdated and inaccurate that table and the article are. In 2016 there were about 2 million EVs on the road (still a figure too big to ignore in that table). In 2024 the estimate is 40 million. It's like basing the recycling rate of aluminum on how much aluminum foil is recycled while ignoring aluminum cans. Furthermore, since growth of EVs is exponential it is essential to use the latest numbers, not data that is 8 years old.
> That’s also why I will not repeat the false claims in text form, but will instead include them as screenshots that Google and LLMs can’t crawl in the same way.
Time to make those images captchas 😈
Excellent as always, Hannah. One other point to be made is that any figures about recycling batteries from 2016 (or whatever, i.e., not the past couple years) are so out-of-date as to be useless anyway. Not only has the total number/mass of lithium-ion batteries vastly increased since 2016 -- nearly all of them certainly not at the end of their life -- but also recycling technologies and companies have proliferated during these past several years.
Next time the first instance of any new technology is made, someone should loudly broadcast that it’s 0 % recycled, ensuring the fossilization of this statistic. They might even succeed in paralyzing its development, so the statistic will actually stay true.
I think their analyses and your critique miss the most important angle. It's not the *number* of batteries that we should be counting, but the mass. It would take 100 or so hearing aid batteries to match one mobile phone battery, and about 4500 iPhone batteries per Tesla Model 3.
Surely we should be counting both: number AND mass. And not just in terms of "recycling" -- as the LEAST desirable and last option of Reduce, Re-use, Recycle.
This includes re-use of ex-EV batteries for example, as static power backup for domestic solar installations, or to store excess power generation (by wind or solar with intermittency problem) to regulate the Smart Grid.
Such Re-use accounts for batteries with the largest mass, in much more useful and efficient ways than materials recovery -- as an end of the line destination.
Thank you for this important article, Hannah! It's frightening how many numbers enter our collective understanding of topics that turn out to be the result of a flimsy or wrong quotation somewhere deep down the rabbit hole. Most probably people pick up any number they can find that supports their narrative, their view of the world, like here: If you have a preconceived notion that batteries are bad at being recycled, you will be less cautious to quote such a stark number that strongly supports your view.
This 5% number is not nothing. It comes from call2recycle.org that releases they recycling data yearly, and their numbers are cited in US Dept. Or Energy reports. However, their data infographic is really confusing and I could not figure out what the latest recycling rate is.
Always appreciate efforts to debunk rogue stats. One note though: ChatGPT has no problem grabbing text from images. I just asked it to summarise the text in your search results image and got the following response back:
The text in the image addresses a common misconception about lithium-ion battery recycling. It claims that one of the most widespread but incorrect “facts” is that only 5% of lithium-ion batteries are recycled, implying that 95% of them end up in landfills. The date provided for this information is January 17, 2024. The source is LinkedIn, with a link to an article titled “The 5% rate and other untruths about battery recycling.”
Hello Hannah, there is a lot of discussion about the environmental impact of (car) batteries vs fossil fuels, but I was wondering if you would have any pointers to credible research (or you have already researched this) comparing the environmental impact (e.g. water use, CO2, use of scarce resources) of batteries (single use alkaline or rechargeable batteries: NiMh or lithium) vs no batteries (e.g. using cabled devices). There are more and more devices which come with batteries while previously they were just cabled (all kinds of IT periphery) and I would like to know whether this is something to "fuss less about if disposed correctly" or that really matters. Thanks!