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Just curious, are lithium batteries worse than other disposable batteries that end up in landfill? In know many are Nickle cadmium, but aren't just as many ALSO lithium batteries?
(Here in Australia at least there are means of "safely" disposing of batteries, and nicotine vapes are in-theory not for sale).
Lithium batteries aren't exactly great if they still hold a charge, they risk violent combustion if damaged/pierced.
The problems really occur when they end up in amongst trash heaps/recycling plants as they can ignite causing huge plastic/rubbish fires that smolder internally for days before suddenly going up.
IIRC there are other metals included in lithium batteries that you don't want leaking into the ground water (lithium isn't great, but heavy metals can be pretty awful)
Some places take the vapes, but afaik there is no consistent program, this is compounded by a lot of the people I see using these vapes are children/young teens, which means a lot of them don't end up in the bin, but literally just thrown on the ground.
On top of that, lithium ion batteries aren't designed as disposable batteries. In devices like vapes, they should be getting upwards of 400 charge cycles before being considered spent. Some get more, some get less, but in "disposable" vapes, they get one. It's just horrifically wasteful!
The problem is there is no real infrastructure to recycle the stuff so it just ends up in landfills with the associated pollution from discarded batteries.
There are processes to recover raw materials from Li-Ion cells: freeze them to decrease electrolytic reactions, shred them and separate the bits mechanically (using computer vision) and chemically. Very expensive and risky.
I'm not sure I'd want to work in the place where they shred lithium batteries..!