Its not happening that way at all. These batteries aren't just going to landfill they are going into a bunch of places.
1. The old batteries are ripped apart into their individual 18650 batteries, tested and then repurposed into lower capacity/charge/discharge powerwalls and other uses.
2. There is a commercial company buying the second hand batteries and racking them for grid storage.
3. The lithium is being recycled for the batteries that have lost too much or shorted because its commercially viable to do so.
Batteries are immensely valuable now and getting more so as is the material and there is a economic value in their reuse and recycling and that is happening at enormous scale.
The ecological disaster was always going to be the cathode, not lithium.
That thing is mixed with some advanced polymers and the metal (be that manganese or cobalt) is hard to extract from this.
The process to recycle them is going to be extremely dirty and solvent laden.
1. The old batteries are ripped apart into their individual 18650 batteries, tested and then repurposed into lower capacity/charge/discharge powerwalls and other uses.
2. There is a commercial company buying the second hand batteries and racking them for grid storage.
3. The lithium is being recycled for the batteries that have lost too much or shorted because its commercially viable to do so.
Batteries are immensely valuable now and getting more so as is the material and there is a economic value in their reuse and recycling and that is happening at enormous scale.