It's also worth noting that raw materials used in batteries are trivially 100% recyclable and thus reusable to make future cars.
Oh sure, and where exactly does that happen in actual, you know, real reality? Pretty much nowhere? Oh, guess it's not all that "trivial" after all.
It is absolutely trivial, and is done every day for smaller batteries. But there aren't enough of these large car battery packs to recycle yet, so it isn't economically feasible to do so. Until there's a steady flow of failing batteries, it would be financial suicide to build the plant and have it idling most of the time.
Ah, so the typical egghead "trivial" of "hey, I got this cool thingy to work in my lab, the rest is just business and economics which is trivial in comparison, right?". Well, no it isn't. That's why people who can do business well tend to drive better cars than people who can do science well.
I think it's safe to say that I know a lot more about the business than you do, if you're saying stuff like that.
Here's a dose of reality: One million tons of lithium ion batteries are being recycled every year. This isn't an "in the lab" situation. That's real-world large-scale recycling. It's only about 5% of the lithium ion batteries out there, but that's mostly because it's hard to convince people to recycle much of anything when you can just throw it away.
But for car batteries, obviously people can't exactly throw them in their garbage cans, so it is safe to say that the industry can easily collect approximately 100% of failed packs that don't catch fire.
The *only* major difference between the process of recycling a car battery pack and recycling any other batteries is the need to tear apart the pack first. And yes, as I said, they're not really doing that, but there are also only probably single-digit to double-digit thousand car lithium ion packs that need to be ripped apart for recycling at this point, and it just isn't economically feasible to build the machines to do it until that number is much larger, because a week or two later, you'd shut down the plant again.
Also, a lot of times, car battery packs contain sub-packs that can be used to replace failed sub-packs in other battery packs with similar levels of wear, but doing that refurbishing work requires a very large number of candidate packs so that you can find one with almost exactly the same level of wear so that the pack stays balanced. Thus, there is a big advantage right now to not recycling the vast majority of the defective battery packs, because they can be parted out to repair other people's packs, resulting in getting hundreds of thousands more miles out of them without having to spend the effort to dissolve them or melt them down for raw materials.
But when there are enough defective *sub*-packs to warrant spinning up the recycling plants, they will do so, because it is, as I said, completely and utterly trivial to rip the packs apart, and the rest of the recycling process is being done at industrial scale all around the world already.