With electromobility being one of the main pillars of a net zero world, of course the adequate recycling of old batteries is essential. So far the main challenge was to sell electric cars at all. Not many years ago the whol car industry was openly making fun of Tesla for its vision. Now that Tesla has proven that ist actually is possible to produce great, sexy electric car that people actrually want to buy, the second step (recycling the batteries) is getting more important. Just like with electric cars 20 years ago, it is clear that it's absolutely possible to recycle those batteries to create a closed-loop battery supply. All we need is companies who are willing enough to invest a bit of money to perfect the technology and make the process more economical. The claim of pro fossil fueled cars people, that car batteries would make an environmental mess and therefore we must all continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere and drive petrol cars is simply nonsense.
While we need to try to avoid waste in general, most of us can't live without producing waste yet. As long that's the case we at least ought to make the best of it and for example burn the waste in a "waste plant" where the energy from the combustion process can be used as heat (to heat houses) or be turned into electricity. There's barely any smoke coming out of the power plant as the pollutants from the incineration are filtered out. It is hard to find numbers but the power plant is probably not polluting more than an average highway. Which is why you may find those modern waste plants within residential areas in cities with no negative effect on people's haelth living next to it. In Copenhagen they built Amager Bakke that is combining leisure with utility as it has a ski slope (Copenhill) on top of it. When we throw away plastic and we burn that waste in such a power plant there is still CO2 emitting. But at least we can use that plastic waste one more time and generate heat and electricity. Instead of putting the waste on a dump and potentially pollute the ground and the air with toxins. And at Amager Bakke they are planning to absorb back 500'000 tonnes of CO2 with carbon capture technology. In a net zero society we may replace plastic with organic material that does not come from crude oil. And we still wopuld want to burn those materials in such waste plants.