The crazy thing is that 25 years after installing the system still works, its just not as efficent. Also you are just wrong about batteries, we already recycle lithium its just that once a battery pack is no longer useful for its application its better NOT to grind it down and sort out the materials, but first to reuse it in another application.
This is the area where we are still working on improving, current tech is looking at doing 2nd lifecycle applications for EV batteries in grid scale storage for example.