Lithium ore is often < 1%. I'm no miner, but I'd bet an old battery beats that!

Concentration isn’t the whole story though. Plastic is 100% plastic, but it’s still hard and expensive to recycle.

Lithium batteries need to be removed from their device. Then removed from their casing. Both these steps are for things made tamper proof to some degree.

Add transportation, labor and environmental [1] costs.

In general recycling of mtls used in electronic devices is dirty and expensive.

Now a car with a big battery will change a lot of these numbers. But the problem remains: we look for tech solution (i.e. e-cars) to our social problems (bad cities, “weak” ppl [2])

[1] the Chinese are increasingly reluctant to import the worlds trash.

[2] as a kid my wife used newspaper for toilet paper at an outhouse, no one owned cars and her grandparents village was a three hour walk (no roads). That’s strong. My mom drove me to school. That’s weak

[2] That's nothing. When I was kid I walked 5 miles each way to school. Needless to say - uphill both ways.

We’ll have 1200 years to think about it.