Piles of spent batteries stacking up leaking heavy metals into the envirionment without a large scale plan to deal with them.

So again, you’re describing an avalanche type event where all this need for recycling appears overnight, and that without it we’ll have massive environmental damage. Neither of those is likely to occur like that.

Small numbers of batteries will outright fail or be destroyed in crashes becoming useless immediately. This will increase in a fairly predictable way giving lots of indications about needed recycling infrastructure (of which some exists today). Further, the time horizon for larger numbers of batteries to become unusable is likely decades away. Batteries that degrade from use don’t stop working, but rather become uneconomical to continue to use them in cars and they be come stationary energy storage, like this:

Old Nissan LEAF Batteries Being Used For Grid-Scale Storage In California

Your source links don’t support your argument well. The first just talks about how much a car battery weighs with no mention of recycling, life span, or disposal, and you even posted an inaccurate number from your article on the weight impact of the battery materials. You said:

A single EV uses a 1,000 pound battery pack (on average)

…but your source says this: "On average, about 60 to 75 percent of a battery’s total weight comes from the cells and the materials they contain, while the remaining 25 to 40 percent is made up of the battery’s metal casing, cables, and thermal and battery management systems (TMS and BMS). "

So the weight of the material you’re citing as dangerous is only 600 lbs to 750 lbs, not the 1000lbs you mention.

Your second link also doesn’t contain any info on battery usage, degradation, recycling, or disposal, and is just an article talking about the number of cars on the road. It looks like you just took the first sentence from that link which was:

"According to an Experian Automotive Market Trends report from the fourth quarter of 2023, there were about 3.3 million electric cars on the road in the U.S. "

…which you then multiplied by the incorrectly heavy metal battery number from your prior article

A single EV uses a 1,000 pound battery pack (on average)

…to arrive at your statement…

3.3 BILLION pounds of future battery waste.

That’s an unnecessary and inaccurate scare tactic.

Yes we will need more capacity for disposing of batteries properly, but the problem at scale is decades away, not tomorrow. Further, the materials themselves are valuable long after any energy storage capacity is exhausted. They are too valuable to throw away. Legislation already passed is working to create a market for this by offering tax incentives in the USA for batteries built from recycled battery material in the USA. This is in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Here’s an actual source that talks about EV battery degradation, lifespan, and recycling. source

“Then there’s the Inflation Reduction Act, also passed in 2022, which grants US taxpayers a federal tax credit on the purchase of a new EV. The act stipulates that a certain percentage of the materials used to create those vehicles must be mined or processed in the United States. This puts pressure on EV manufacturers to step up domestic EV battery recycling.”

So again, I’m not seeing the crisis you are.