If only people would bother to get recycling right
News from the depths of the stock market.
The success of the latest trials support Primobius' goal of being the first to achieve the proposed recycling recovery requirements in the pending EU Battery Regulations. These regulations will mandate recycling of all batteries placed on the EU market. Once legislated, authorised recyclers will be required to recover at least 90% of contained nickel, cobalt, and copper by 2026, increasing to 95% in 2030, 35% for lithium in 2026 increasing to 75% by 2030.
This is nonsense. We have a perfectly good system to work out how much of, to what level of metals recovery, the lithium battery market should be recycled. That method is called “prices”. If copper, nickel, cobalt and lithium are valuable then they will be extracted from batteries to be used again. After all, those millions of tonnes of them would just be money lying around the countryside. There is no barrier to people doing said recycling. The world recycles some 99.9% of all gold ever used (the usual exception noted is that which weathers off gilt onion domes on certain churches) and perhaps 90% of copper and 60% of iron and so on. The decision to recycle is on whether the process of doing so makes a profit - profit being the value added by undertaking the activity.
There are no externalities here that need to be incorporated, the pure market system, driven by prices alone, takes care of everything. So, why do we have an EU target for the recovery rate that must be achieved?
The asnwer being that the EU - and, to be fair, near all other governmental organisations - thinks that there’s some looming shortage of metals about to arrive. This is untrue, it is simply wrong. But they’re planning on the basis of their ignorance - which is one of the reasons why state planning is such a bad way to run the world. That state planning is done by the ignorant, usually in the grips of some fashionable fad. We out here all get poorer as resources are devoted to sating the plans created by that lack of knowledge of the real world.
The optimal recycling and recovery rates are those the free market would arrive at unaided.
Yes, it does get worse too:
… the process flowsheet to meet the ambitious new 2030 recovery targets of the EU Battery Regulations. The goal post shift from 85% to 95% during the drafting of the legislation was challenging
Even if we accept that the bureaucrats knew what they were doing (no, we’ve met many, they don’t) the political process then moved from that bureaucratically determined optimum to one defined purely by the fantasies of babykissers.
This is not an efficient method of running the world. We’re fine with the idea that where markets don’t work then use other methods of management. But we do insist that where markets unaided work just fine, even optimally, then we should use markets unaided. That markets don’t work for everything is entirely true, but let's use them where they do.