American dependence on battery technology has exploded in recent years and continues to grow rapidly. However, America is almost entirely dependent on imports for critical minerals required to make these batteries. Due to growing concerns about this dependence and little management plan for end-of-life batteries, many have cited battery recycling as a way to obtain these minerals from within American borders and address environmental issues. While there is a growing literature connecting geopolitical risk to interest in battery recycling, a quantitative link is absent. This paper proposes a solution using the sentiment and frequency of articles scraped from Google News (2014-2024) and an index of geopolitical risk created by Caldera. Sentiment was classified using a modified version of the DistilRoBERTa model. Time series analysis was performed to reveal that while measured geopolitical risk had little explanatory power for interest in battery recycling, lithium and silver prices had positive, significant (1% level) relationships with interest in battery recycling. Chow Tests confirmed COVID-19 as an inflection point for interest in battery recycling. Further research will be needed to explore this link more thoroughly, but this paper lays the foundations for empirical study of battery recycling interest in the United States.