[Comfortably Numb]

Thanks Rick o'shea, you have saved me the task of checking all that information out and writing a very similar post (bar the bit about flights - I can't afford to fly that much, but would try to resist the temptation if I could. If I could fill my fuel tank with sunlight, I would do so, as effectively, this is what you are doing. As you say, lithium traction batteries are proving to be very long lived, the ev industry considers a lithium battery has reached the end of its automotive life when it only holds 80% of its original charge, and many a Prius with over 200,000 miles is still on its first battery.
At this stage, electricity companies are happy to use these "redundant" batteries to store off peak energy, to balance out the peaks and troughs of demand, while the battery recycling industry experiments with ways to maximise the percentage of materials retrieved, and maximise the efficiency of these operations, but to date, the quantities involved, rather like the manufacturing of EVs themselves, does not make this a low-cost operation, especially in comparison to the 5 X cheaper cost of mining lithium, and some of the other nasty materials involved. Perhaps if we applied our own health and safety regimes to the workers in these mines, and paid them a European wage, recycling would become a more cost-effective alternative. I wholly subscribe to Labour's eco-home building policy, a building technologist reckons that an average carbon-neutral home will cost around an extra £5,000 to build compared to a conventional one. That sounds like money well-spent to me, and if they could include an end-of-life EV battery in the specification, every home could provide a charge for its electric car, produced from sunlight and off-peak grid electricity. Admittedly, it would be more expensive to make our existing housing stock carbon-neutral, but solar panels and a storage battery with a charging point would be a good start - especially for those of us dependent on car transport. (2 buses a week in my village). All electricity has to be generated - why not use the free power supplied daily by the sun in various forms - solar, wind, hydro or tidal? Rather than continuing to release the carbon into our atmosphere that was trapped millions of years ago. It is not the fact of climate change that is the problem, it is the rate of it. Fake news is just the news you choose not to believe.