I guess if you're a massive recycling facility and working on 30,000+MT of raw batteries as input, the 2% extra could equate to a fair amount, certainly when the spot price is $28,000/MT.
Considering spot prices for cobalt are dropping quickly and are now back to pre-2019 levels... not sure it makes sense to invest heavily in this.
What happens with the slag from these operations? I assume it is easy enough to separate out the metals from plastics, all of the metal is still potentially available for reprocessing.
Do they keep a huge deposit of these tailings hoping for it to be profitable some day?
Possibly. What happens to mine tailings and slag from other smelting operations?
BTW referring to it as “huge deposits” is likely exaggerating. There are currently only a small number of battery packs that have failed to the point of being processed. Even with larger number of EVs, the number will climb slowly and will probably never be enough to produce huge slag deposits.
I’m not very familiar with the ellconomics of recycling, but I doubt that this process to recover an additional 2% will be cost effective.