The lead batteries have always be 90%+ recycled (well, at least since any time we should care about). So the amount of mining is still proportional to the amount of batteries running around.
Right. The recycling rate is around 99%, apparently. So the number of lead batteries running around only has to shrink by 1% per year before we don't need to mine any new lead for batteries. Something that seems likely to happen in the coming years as EVs become dominant and Li-ion gets cheaper.
