system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 disposal/recycling of electric vehicle batteries.

At some point when all vehicles are electric how do we as a planet get rid of the batteries that will eventually require replacement?

Edit: what I’m getting is that EV are awesome after they are made until end life; but mining the Lithium for the batteries is worse for the land(arguable) and the recycling will end up like the current model where eventually they will stop and the sizable batteries will stack somewhere. Did I miss something?
gpt
We recycle them. Both Lithium and Lead Acid batteries can be recycled very well and very completely.

When you charge and discharge a battery, different chemicals move between different places in the battery, and between being in a solid state and a liquid state. After a while, the solid state crystals become weirdly shaped, and after that point it is difficult to charge and discharge the battery any more. That’s when the battery is “dead”. But this is just a physical problem, not a chemical one. The chemicals themselves don’t change, they are just in weird crystalline shapes. So we take the batteries, and take the chemicals out, separate them, melt them into new molds, and make new batteries that have correctly shaped solid structures inside them again, and then they work great again.

This recycling process works very well, and it is the reason that when you buy a new car battery they give you a refund for the old car battery, because they then recycle that old battery into a new one.