What if recycled batteries glut the metals market?
A direct-recycling breakthrough floods reclaimed Li/Ni/Co, undercutting primary miners — the clean trade is short lithium/nickel names and a lower cost curve, not the Nvidia +0.4% AI tangent the roots inject. Rhymes with the 2023-24 lithium crash (spodumene -80%) when oversupply gutted Albemarle/Pilbara. Transmission: hits Indonesian nickel and DRC cobalt economics hardest. Forward: recycling adds a structural supply tail that caps any future battery-metal squeeze — bearish the miners' terminal multiple, not just spot.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A direct-recycling breakthrough floods the market with reclaimed lithium, nickel, and cobalt, undercutting primary miners. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Industrial demand ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.