It’s never a question of “Can this be recycled?” It’s a question of “Is this so cheap and easy to recycle that the old whatever-it-is has positive value?” For something like aluminum cans, the answer is yes; for plastic, the answer has historically been no; for lithium, it depends strongly on the form factor of the batteries.
Some are easy to disassemble, but many–including Tesla’s–were designed to be assembly-only. Makes 'em cheaper, but this makes them very expensive to meaningfully recycle. You basically have to incinerate them and recover the lithium from the ash. Toxicologically speaking, a lot can go wrong doing that.
Shel Evergreen wrote a good article about this back in 2022: Lithium costs a lot of money—so why aren’t we recycling lithium batteries? | Ars Technica
