I’ve always wondered this. Are there any recycling plants that actually open them up and use the contents to make new cells? Can the lithium etc be separated out?
Yeah, probably.
I found this overview article from 2019:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1682-5
And newer (2021) Wired article:
Yeah, absolutely.
For example, internally, Tesla is recycling a very high percentage of their cells(>90%).
Technology is incredible. Some 800 mAh cells are recycled into 20000 mAh 18650 UltraFire cells.
There’s is a recycling plant that opened in Norway recently: Largest EU battery recycling plant comes online – enough for all of Norway's batteries | Electrek
So it takes battery packs in and recover 95% of the materials in them, the powder containing nickel, manganese, cobalt and lithium is sent to another plant for separation, purification and then reuse in new cells.
[edit] wrote this before seeing Freeman’s post. 3 cheers to Norway and Hydrovolt.
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i doubt anyone is doing this in the US except possibly tesla may be re-purposing packs for solar storage.
It has to be economically feasible for anyone to consider doing this.
For 18650 the quick money is in the roll of thin copper foil used for the anode, but it is quite hazardous and difficult, messy and time consuming to dismantle a cell into the separate components. Each cell would need to be fully discharged before cutting the can open to remove the jelly roll; any shorting contact will vaporize the thin aluminum foil current collector bonded to thin plastic separators in contact with the thin paste of the carbon graphite cathode. It’s a big black sticky carbon mess to handle and there is no solvent for carbon to dissolve it out of the way.
The lithium is contained as a salt in the few drops of slimy organic electrolyte gel. Other high value metals are compounds in the carbon graphite paste.
If you just throw a pack into a shredder then you end up with a mixture of tiny fragments that could be smelted in a big furnace and chemically processed to extract metals and compounds. Almost as expensive as smelting rock and ore.
[later edit] found info about Redwood Materials Inc, in Nevada. Founded by J.B. Straubel, who was co-founder and served as chief technical officer at Tesla, Inc. for 16 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwood_Materials,\_Inc.
it isn;t worth it
lot of labor and danger opening the cans, not much to get really
lithium isn;t rare or expensive
anything else is buried in flammable or poison other things
tesla says they are doing it but who knows the truth
Just hire some Ukrainian guys in shorts and flipflops (ie, safety equipment) to scoop out the innards.
Eh, it isn’t dangerous to recycle lithium ion cells with proper equipment and procedures.
Yeh, just need to dunk ’em in water to make sure they don’t catch fire. 
More like discharge them down below 1.0V, but ok.
Well, currently, I believe you’re correct that the economics between recycling and mining are either boarderline or in favour of mining, however, I’ve not looked at the numbers recently. Costs for recycling will come down as the technology matures, plus there’s scope to design more “recyclable” cells.
Im aware the difference between lithium compounds and lithium metal in cells, however, for ease of calculation: According to USGS, lithium carbonate was US$17,000/ton in 2021; an unverified source I found online states a 70Kwh pack uses 63kg of lithium carbonate, which, by 2021 price would be about US$1071 of lithium carbonate.
Whether lithium is expensive depends on your viewpoint, yes it’s less expensive than something like gold, but the effort involved in finding good quality lithium deposits, in policically stable regions, and mining and processing said deposits in a morally and socially acceptable mannor, is not easy, nor cheap.
lithium is also very plentiful in sea water, it just takes energy to get it out