Consider how much of the “recycling” we dutifully separate from our trash actually gets recycled. Aluminum and steel cans most maybe. Glass and paper some maybe. Plastics not so much. Imagine literally millions of EV batteries containing a toxic soup of chemicals…I have my doubts few if any will get recycled. Lithium ion batteries also have a tendency to catch fire. Imagine thousands of Li-ion batteries stockpiled awaiting recycling … a disaster waiting to happen
EV batteries are big enough - and valuable enough - that nobody is going to just throw them out. As the quantity of unusable EV batteries grows large enough, the economy of scale will kick in making purchase & recycling of EV batteries viable.
Much of the EV technology stack has gone thru this process. Other industries do the same: something impractical becomes profitable on a large enough scale.