I'm not seeing the analogy. The lithium market is surprisingly small for the same reasons that plastics are...?
I concede the point that small individual parts of the overall waste economy are prominent problems... but where's the way back to lithium.
Lithium is cheap enough that Elon could buy all of it with just his bitcoin. He's a guy with a use for lithium. Why not solve all possible scarcity concerns with the jingle of a purse. More realistishly... Unless there's something I'm missing, I can't see how a lithium price spike could affect the price of an electric car noticeably.
My analogy wasn't about any special processing or any special segment of garbage. It was a more basic comparison that we as a western society depend heavily on regular garbage takeaway (because we consume so much single use crap) but the people who take away our garbage aren't paid much and get looked down upon on top of that. So it's an important part of society that is severely underpriced compared to the value it provides. One of the primary reasons it can be so underpriced is because the workforce can be trivially trained (relatively speaking) and there seems to always be enough people interested in working.
From your comment that the lithium market is so small, yet always talked about as criticial - I guessed that perhaps that's because it's similarly easy to find and train lithium miners.
As for Elon and lithium, I remember recently watching some interview or talk that he gave, where he mentioned that he doesn't consider lithium a problem at all precicely because it is so abundant in the US.
So yes, to me it seems as well that there is no scarcity to fear. There might be a temporary shortage, but it can be solved rather quickly with money.
