I don’t know anywhere near the full scope of this industry, but what seems to’ve been the case so far is that Lithium Ion battery recycling isn’t really happening because not enough batteries have died yet, to sustain a company in that industry. Which y’know, bit of a good problem to have, but it’s also a problem that Lead-Acid batteries had toward the early phases of their use. As was the case then, it took time for enough batteries to die to sustain an industry in battery recycling, and even moreso exacerbated with Lithium car batteries having a longer lifespan.

The interesting part is that once we have enough batteries to sustain the market, a very small proportion has to be manufactured from raw materials to makeup for product lost in the recycling process. This has Lithium in a weird state where we currently heavily rely on its extraction, yet as far as the auto industry is concerned, it won’t be too terribly long in the future when we’d have the baseline supply we need.

Anyways, no clue if that’s truly their approach or not, but we’re at a point that I feel it wouldn’t be entirely unjustifiable to consider.