Pretty much everything is a raw material of the future. Even household waste has much higher concentrations of metals than most ore deposits.
In future, we could have an effective way of mining landfill for resources. Some forms of recycling now are highly inefficient and it’s conceivable that we’d be better off utilizing landfill and recycling with better techniques later.
I expect you'll see increasing mining of tailings piles as things like gold extraction technology improves.
The thing is now you’re rewarding an industry for making a mess in the first place, which is a bad pattern.
This is pretty far from the truth. Rock is less chemically complex than living plants, animals, and fungi, it's true; but there's a long distance from "less than hundreds of millions" to "just a few".
The article explains how it's done in the case of lithium-ion batteries.
It is true that to the extent that you can reduce the admixture of other materials, you can reduce the costs.
> How do you plan to do this
The standard mining methods include roasting, oxidation, and reduction (pyrometallurgy); froth flotation; lixiviation; defecation; crushing and grinding (milling or comminution); screening; and agglomeration. More exotic methods, some of which are crucial to one or another method, include vacuum sublimation, electrolysis (molten-salt or aqueous), amalgamation, recrystallization, and fractional distillation. There are also processes that don't fit neatly into one of these categories, such as the Pidgeon process. There's a good outline at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Extractive_metallurgy.
Batteries obviously have a small (-ish) set of possible compounds and it should be economically feasible to recycle used batteries once there is sufficient volume that needs to be recycled. (I guess we're still at least a decade away but that remains to be seen... if it's sufficiently efficient, it could be cheaper to recycle than reuse older batteries).
The poop fertilized plants, the plants were harvested, some of them were turned into bread, others fed a pig, and that's what you're eating. Some of the poop decayed and was released as gases into the air, which were then recaptured by the plants, by bacteria in the roots of soybeans, and by Haber-Bosch factories (confusingly also called plants) which made synthetic fertilizer to fertilize the plants further.
You are recycling your sandwich, made from poop, into more poop.
This is the reflection on the disgusting nature of food and its link to the interdependent arising of all things. Your existence is inextricably linked to the existence of the pig and the poop. They are not separate processes; they are different focuses in the same process.
>Half of all the elements that are heavier than iron—such as thorium and uranium—were thought to be made when neutron stars, the superdense remains of burnt-out suns, crashed into one another. Long theorized, neutron star collisions were not confirmed until 2017. Now, however, fresh analysis by Karakas and fellow astronomers Chiaki Kobayashi and Maria Lugaro reveals that the role of neutron stars may have been considerably overestimated—and that another stellar process altogether is responsible for making most of the heavy elements.
(Though the atomic nuclei didn't originate in the poop; they were just passing through. But cobalamin molecules, for example, do originate in poop pretty often.)
If you count CO2 as “poop” the percentages rise but the fossils still are in the lead.
KING CLAUDIUS Alas, alas!
HAMLET A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
KING CLAUDIUS What dost you mean by this?
HAMLET Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.
For reference, that’s a Futurama quote.
It seems like battery lifetime may be better than expected (except in arizona, especially if your battery doesn't have sufficient cooling). And there hasn't been a lot of reporting of this happening, I haven't seen many anecdotal reports either. Maybe, it's still too early.
This is a big (underreported) factor in CNG vehicles though, a lot of their fuel tanks are expiring now, and for at least some vehicles, it's not economical to replace the tank, and at least PG&E requires a safety report before authorizing people to use their stations, so that makes a car junk simply because you can't fuel it.
I joke, but I do believe there will be "waste miners" at some point in the future.