Recycled hopefully. This isn’t your average car battery that you change yourself and just toss in the garbage. ......
Although 99% of lead acid batteries are recycled in the US only 5% of lithium ion batteries are recycled.
I was involved (let’s leave it at — nothing to do with EV’s) the materials below.
Here are some facts about the batteries:
Worse than what do you do with worn out Li batteries is how do you get the materials needed to make them.
Raw materials needed are cobalt, rare earth elements, and of course lithium.
Cobalt is particularly bad as its mining products hazardous tailings and slags and nearby communities. Most of the stuff in mined in the Congo by workers (men, women and children ) use hand tools. Not safe and not healthy process (no OSHA there)— but hey, at least its helps those that can afford it drive around in $80,000 Tesla.
Lithium is mined either in Austrilia, Argentina, Bolivia or Chile. The process uses large amounts of ground water (much more than used in I. C. vehicles) depriving local farmers of water for their crops — but hey, they can always work in lithium mining.
Finally, rare earths almost exclusively come from China(in fact China threatened to cut off them when Trump imposed tariffs on China) and besides batteries are used in all kinds of high performance motors, cell phones and products such as commercial and military RADAR, etc. Mining of the stuff requires removal of radioactive contaminants.
The are called Rare earths for a reason and right now EV's (and hence usage of the stuff) are relatively small quantities.