this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Question to anyone who might know more: would sodium based batteries be better than lithium ones for the environment, in terms of recycling or disposing of it?
In case they are indeed better, would they be better because it's better to use less lithium in general (so if you use more sodium based ones, you use less lithium) or would they be also better because their own disposal is "nicer" (as in less toxic) for the environment?
Well, Sodium is the 6th most abundant element on Earth, so there's a lot more of it and the extraction process is probably far more environmentally friendly.
Since Sodium batteries are so new I don't think we have data on the toxicity, disposal or recycling avenues yet.
They're actually old tech. They just could never match lithium.
They'll shine as standing storage more so than mobile applications. Home storage will benefit greatly from their improvements
That's very interesting. If they can be used at home or in cars that don't require batteries with a very large capacity, then that would be really good to counter the scarcity of lithium (and hopefully, help the environment too)
If they can get industrial scale it could also allow energy grids to capture excess power instead of wasting it. Could yield massive efficiency increases being able to reclaim some of that loss.