The environmental impact of mining the materials for battery manufacturing is ridiculous..
Yes, but the obvious effects are Somewhere Else and the issue is not politicised so it will continue to be ignored. Reality doesn't matter in politics. Only public perception matters.
[..] So what happens to these dying batteries?
Almost always landfill, where they create another chemical waste problem. Part of the reason is the way the materials are mined - the widespread disregard for the environmental impact and the health and safety of the workers means that the prices are reduced, which reduces the economic pressure to recycle. It's difficult and resource-intensive to recycle lithium batteries, so unless new materials are significantly more expensive recycling batteries will be a niche thing unless it's forced on battery manufacturers by governments. That would be strongly resisted economically and politically, being framed as governments trying to suppress "green" technology, being ruled by Big Oil, blah blah blah.
What's the life expectancy of today's tech, and where to next?
Just thinking out loud a bit here, I'm rather curious where we're going to go from here and whether our reliance on batteries is sustainable in the long run.
It isn't sustainable without some major advances in technology. Life expectancy of today's tech is going
down pretty quickly. Partly because of the increase in power requirements, increase in amount of usage, reduction in expected charge times and reduction in expected size and weight and partly because it's more profitable to have customers replace kit more often. If stuff lasts too long, there's not enough profit in selling it. Of course, companies can always have their stuff spy on users and sell data about them to whoever is buying. Cambridge Analytica is very far from the only business buying data on people.
How batteries are charged is far more important than many people realise. It's why EVs are less affected by battery degradation than might be expected from such a large scale high power use - they're generally charged in as efficient a way as possible. That's not viable for most uses of batteries, though. It's too slow and needs too much other kit (heater, cooler, charge management computer, etc). I have a good extreme example from my own life. I bought a dirt cheap media player from Amazon. The cheapest MP3 player I could find with a small screen (a simple scrolling display of a few characters wasn't enough for what I wanted). It was ~£10. I bought 3. The 1st one lasted a few weeks before battery degradation reduced the useable time from over 10 hours to under 1 hour. Same for the 2nd one. I assumed that they were so cheap because the batteries were second hand ones that had already been discarded and bought by the manufacturer of the media player for next to nothing. Then I realised that I might be using the wrong charging method. The device had a common connector for a charger and I was using one I had around for some reason. It charged the device in very little time...which I should have realised was a problem before I got to the 3rd player. I've been charging that 3rd player only via USB from my PC...and I'm still using it a couple of years later with no noticeable battery degradation. It takes far longer to charge, probably 10 times as long. Not a problem for an MP3 player - I just plug it into my PC when I think about it and a full charge will probably last a week anyway - but that won't fly for a "phone" that requires far more power and requires charging far more often.
There's always talk of some radical new technology that will result in batteries that hold 5, 10, 100 times as much charge per weight and/or charge many times faster and/or don't degrade. Always talk, but never a product. It's the usual thing with tech news - scientists publish a paper about an interesting experiment that works on a small scale in carefully controlled lab conditions and at a high price and reporters publish THE WORLD IS SAVED! stories about it because those stories sell. It's the "based on a true story" thing, made all the more prevalent because "green" technology is politically fashionable too. There's another financial aspect to it as well - there's money available for "green" tech research, so there's a strong motive to play up any potentially relevant research.
