My view is maybe a little bit orthogonal to that of many other scientists and researchers. My view is that the future is in the longest-lived batteries possible, so that you minimize the need for recycling. You install a battery in an energy storage facility and it lasts 40 or 50 years, not 10 years. If you install a battery in a vehicle, it can be used for vehicle-to-grid with a couple of charge cycles per day while the car is parked, and you still get 15 years out of the vehicle. At the end of that time, you can repurpose the battery for something else.
Those batteries may not be the highest energy density batteries that you could possibly make, but they'll still be able to drive a car 400 kilometres or so. I think this is the way things should go. We should be making batteries that are the most useful for society, not a battery that makes a sexy car go 600 kilometres.
That's my opinion.