> ban the selling of devices with sealed-in batteries altogether in major markets [...] making batteries at least somewhat easily removed to facilitate recycling.
The opposite is true; removable batteries almost entirely end up in landfills.
Putting batteries non-removably inside devices makes them much more likely to be recycled, along with the rest of the recyclable components of the device.
>The opposite is true; removable batteries almost entirely end up in landfills.
Right now, that may be the case, but that's because those batteries generally have zero scrap value, so you're just hoping users will care enough about the environment to not do this, and take them to a proper recycling bin (like at the entrance to Target).
But the parent was predicting that batteries would become significantly more expensive as these materials became more scarce. In that future, a dead phone battery would still have some value, so people would generally want to take them someplace where they can get money back for them.
The other factor is that, in this possible future of expensive batteries, it'd be much more important for them to be standardized and more easily replaced. If your phone costs $500 sans battery, but the battery for it is another $500, you're going to want a standardized design that you can swap between different phones or other devices.
CPUs, cases, screens, memory chips, radios, antennae...none of the other parts of phones are standardized or swappable, and unlike batteries they are already expensive. Why would batteries suddenly behave differently when they become expensive?
> The opposite is true; removable batteries almost entirely end up in landfills.
That's because they have near-zero value, the component elements still being much cheaper to produce from ore than from recycling. That flips around once we start running out of ore.
Basically, economics takes care of this for us. At the end of the day, battery reagents are unconsumed resources, so we'll be fine (at some price equilibrium probably higher than their price today) so long as the number of people and their need for power storage remains bounded.
The opposite is true; removable batteries almost entirely end up in landfills.
Putting batteries non-removably inside devices makes them much more likely to be recycled, along with the rest of the recyclable components of the device.