U.S. lithium production

[Poppy]

I read somewhere that Lithium, like Oil is a limited resource, but that lithium is recyclable. The design of the construction of car batteries determines to a certain extent how easily the lithium may be extracted. Once there is a standardization of construction, a standardization of extraction, and recycling may become economically feasible. If it could be continually recycled, there would be limited need for additional mining.

 

[aznsx]

I read somewhere that Lithium, like Oil is a limited resource, but that lithium is recyclable. The design of the construction of car batteries determines to a certain extent how easily the lithium may be extracted. Once there is a standardization of construction, a standardization of extraction, and recycling may become economically feasible. If it could be continually recycled, there would be limited need for additional mining.

If it could potentally become like aluminum in that regard, that would be great!

 

[turbodog]

Metals are, in theory, infinitely recyclable. It's a matter of cost: energy, reagents/chemicals, etc. Polymers/plastics degrade with each cycle. I find it hilarious that paper bags are coming back, big time.

 

[idleprocess]

Polymers/plastics degrade with each cycle.

IIRC as consumer packaging plastics go, #1 can be recycled back into like goods, #2 can be downcycled into inferior materials, and the rest cannot be economically recycled. Other types of plastic used for more durable goods can be recycled, but similar to packaging proper sorting is critical and the industry struggles with it. And in both cases the recycling industry has to supply a market that demands the same price and performance from recycled materials as new materials.

 

[bykfixer]

I find it hilarious that paper bags are coming back, big time.

My sister and her band of Karen's had plastic bags banned where she lives. Oh they were so proud of that one. They all used China made cloth bags and really felt like they had saved the planet from mylar balloons, plastic straws and styrofoam. Woohoo!
Then Covid hit 😱. Suddenly those cloth bags were killing grandma. I reminded her this was about the 3rd time in US history that paper bags were all the rage due to cloth bags and their germ spreading potential had been deemed a public hazard. In the late 1800's when groceries were fresh products like fruits, vegetables and fresh cut meats the burlap sack was a disease spreading marvel. In the 1970's paper bags began to be seen as a forest killer. Cloth bags were brought back into action. Same result. Then came post Covid and history repeats.

 

[idleprocess]

Shopping bags, as I see them:

• Disposable Plastic
  • Pro: Cheap, generally stronger than paper
  • Con: Not practically recyclable, present some inherent disposal problems
• Paper
  • Pro: easily recyclable
  • Con: expensive, prone to tearing or failing in use as a bag, consumers don't recycle paper consistently
• Reusable (plastic, cloth, whatnot)
  • Pro: reusable for decades
  • Con: needs to be washed regularly for foodstuffs

Of course one can obviate this issue by avoiding the shopping bag altogether - establishments like Aldi and Costco don't supply them to customers.

And zooming out, I feel like shopping bags are the subject of bikeshedding while ignoring far more substantial issues. Everyone understands shopping bags and can opine at length about them; less so larger issues of resource utilization in other areas of goods production, transportation, consumption.

 

[orbital]

+

Posted this in another thread a while back, has nothing to do with shopping bags.

GM Will Suck Lithium from the Salton Sea to Make Batteries

The process will have a lower environmental impact than traditional lithium mining.

www.autoweek.com

 

[Chauncey Gardiner]

A friend gave me this stack of composite decking. I'm going to use it to rebuild a deck at my mother's house.

Since I kept it from going to the local landfill, I can now use plastic bags guilt-free for the rest of my life. 😄

 

[Galane]

Plastic shopping bags started out as thick as the ones being sold now as reusable. Over the years the manufacturers have made them thinner and thinner to cut costs. They can be recycled but require special shredders that can cut them up without getting the bags all wound up around the works.

It's a similar tale with plastic water bottles. They've been made so thin they can barely stand up under their own weight, and the caps are so short they are next thing to snap on lids they have so little thread.

Soda bottles have remained fairly thick because they have to hold pressure. They're typically an inner layer of virgin PET (required by FDA), an oxygen barrier layer, a thick layer of recycled or mostly recycled PET, and some use an outer layer of virgin PETG. In some bottles only the outer layer may be colored. All these layers are molded into a thick walled preform where the neck ring and threads are the final shape. The preforms are clamped into a hot mold then hot air or inert gas is blown inside to stretch the preform to fill the mold.

What has been found with many thermoplastics is adding 10% virgin resin to the regrind results in a product with nearly 100% the same properties as using 100% new resin.

Recycling thermoset plastics is much harder. They don't melt, or at least not until they're on fire. So there's grinding them up to use as filler or some can be broken down by a chemical process, or they can be burned as fuel.

One odd bit of recycling was the Starrett Re-Tape. That was a tape measure with a case made from recycled tape measures* and plastic. They had a process invented to grind up die cast tape measure housings, mix the metal chunks with old plastic, then injection mold it. I don't know how long they were available because currently I find it impossible to find any information online about them, despite the fact they were made circa 2007. All I can find is a few have been or are for sale on eBay and a few other sites.

*I assume rejects from their own production. Like how a lot of "recycled" paper is "pre consumer" or roll ends, edge trim, and broke paper from the production line tossed back into the vat at the start. AKA what's always been done in paper manufacturing long before the whole recycling thing came along. All paper has always been partially recycled.

 

[bykfixer]

Plastic bag
Pros:
- trash can liners
- luggage
- carry groceries
- void fillier for insulation
- cut into strips make great plarn for crochet work
- make great small trash bags
- use as book covers for the kids
- add insulation to coolers
- make a good wind sock
- can be used to bail water
- lot's of other uses

Con's:
- look really lousy in trees along the highway
- can harm fish
- makes tree huggers mad

So remember folks; reduce, re-use, recycle.

 

[IMA SOL MAN]

Plastic bag
Pros:
- trash can liners
- luggage
- carry groceries
- void fillier for insulation
- cut into strips make great plarn for crochet work
- make great small trash bags
- use as book covers for the kids
- add insulation to coolers
- make a good wind sock
- can be used to bail water
- lot's of other uses

Con's:
- look really lousy in trees along the highway
- can harm fish
- makes tree huggers mad

So remember folks; reduce, re-use, recycle.

Tree huggers--not happy when you turn trees into paper sacks, and not happy when you substitute plastic bags to save the trees. Bottom line--tree huggers are very unhappy people, who get upset when other people are not unhappy, and try to make the rest of us as unhappy as they are. 😭

 

[knucklegary]

Salton Sea, for as long as I can remember stinks to high heaven from pollution.
For decades now, agri runoff has accumulated an abundance of toxic waste.
There are signs posted everywhere warning visitors not to walk bare foot in shallows. During the dry season, toxins are even more heavily saturated in the bottom.

We went through there once, and that was enough for me. Hard to believe anything could be alive in the water, but there are fish and wildlife that survive around the area..

Very good location to drill for lithium. Can't hurt what's already been damaged.

I vote plastic (and not the recycled stuff) for kids in rear seat 🤮

 

[IMA SOL MAN]

Salton Sea, for as long as I can remember stinks to high heaven from pollution.
For decades now, agri runoff has accumulated an abundance of toxic waste.
There are signs posted everywhere warning visitors not to walk bare foot in shallows. During the dry season, toxins are even more heavily saturated in the bottom.

We went through there once, and that was enough for me. Hard to believe anything could be alive in the water, but there are fish and wildlife that survive around the area..

Very good location to drill for lithium. Can't hurt what's already been damaged.

I vote plastic (and not the recycled stuff) for kids in rear seat 🤮

I do too. A soggy paper barf bag seems very undesirable.

 

[knucklegary]

I do too. A soggy paper barf bag seems very undesirable.

Fast foods should delivery in plastic bags, saving us time.. When TB says El Diablo they ain't kidding!

 

[IMA SOL MAN]

Fast foods should delivery in plastic bags, saving us time.. When TB says El Diablo they ain't kidding!

 

[PhotonMaster3]

600-800MW-Hr storage is great for a demand- or transmission-constrained site such as the 32MW site they mention. That's more than a day's worth of production.

But that's more of a frequency-regulation scale installation in a state with a sum generating capacity of some ~27.5GW. Not sure the economics favor Li- based batteries - even cheaper/safer/longer-lasting LFP - for larger scale installations.


The suggestion that mass active CO2 scrubbing is a solution to be pursued is absurd. The volume of air that would need to be physically handled to reduce a trace gas from the present ~410ppm to ~350ppm is - relative to any realistic ability to do so - impossibly vast.

And CO2 is far from the only GHG whose concentration needs to be reduced from the atmosphere.

Ha so true dude. ChatGPT says the earth's atmosphere has a mass of 5.15 million billion tons. It's known for not being 100% accurate but I bet it's within a few orders of magnitude if that number.

 

[jtr1962]

Of course one can obviate this issue by avoiding the shopping bag altogether - establishments like Aldi and Costco don't supply them to customers.

I've been avoiding the shopping bag entirely for a while now. I use my shopping cart to go shopping. It holds ~100 pounds of stuff. I fill it up going down the aisles, take everything out so it can be rung up, then put it back in the cart. No bags needed. I'm not paying a nickel per paper bag. Besides that, when I get home it makes putting the stuff away easier. I avoid one operation, namely taking the stuff out of bags.

I'm of mixed feelings on the plastic bag bans. On the one hand, it can potentially reduce a hard to recycle item. On the other, since lots of people used them for trash bags, the landfill is simply being replaced with real trash bags, which are often thicker than the plastic shopping bags.

 

[bykfixer]

I don't think we are putting the cart before the horse here. No, I think the horse needs to be born then have a chance to grow up before it can pull the cart. The horse hasn't even been born yet while we experiment with inventing a cart.
Yet a bunch of unelected folks flying around in jet airplanes and riding around in giant cars mandate the horse be pulling the cart in a few short years for the rest of us. When they stop flying around and take a solar powered boat or ride around in electric limo's I'll believe what they espouse, but for now the only thing they are producing is horse hockey pucks.

 

[orbital]

The suggestion that mass active CO2 scrubbing is a solution to be pursued is absurd. The volume of air that would need to be physically handled to reduce a trace gas from the present ~410ppm to ~350ppm is - relative to any realistic ability to do so - impossibly vast.

And CO2 is far from the only GHG whose concentration needs to be reduced from the atmosphere.

+

pardon linking cnbc again,
but yes, giant vacuums to suck out CO2, it's hard for me to not start laughing.

Occidental and Climeworks big winners as Biden allocates billions for CO2 removal

The U.S. Department of Energy is investing $1.2 billion in giant vacuums that suck carbon out of the air--an effort to slow global warming.

www.cnbc.com

edit, spelln'

 

[Chauncey Gardiner]

That works out to 120 million for The Big Guy. Who's laughing now?