Batteries: RECYCLING
Batteries are not discarded in landfills. There has been a lot of ‘battery bullshit’ in the media surrounding electric cars. Batteries which are no longer capable of powering an electric car end up in one of two places. Either they are deconstructed and their raw components recycled, or they get a second life as energy storage in a less demanding role.
I'll cover the second life of batteries and energy storage in my next blog, but first let's look at recycling. Multiple new innovative startups have come on the scene to tap into the new end-of-life battery market.
Most of the materials can be recovered like cobalt, nickel, lithium and manganese. Common parts like copper and aluminum enter well established, decades old, recycling processes.
Some media reports depict a future where millions of car batteries are piled up suddenly with nowhere to go. Although the battery recycling industry is still relatively small, the market will grow as EVs age. If you assume a 10-year life for an EV, you're looking at around at least one million EV batteries per year requiring recycling by 2030. This would of course exponentially grow as older cars and batteries begin to reach end of life, but it is going to be a massive industry in the next decade.
Recyclable battery components
This said, recycling is already happening today. The EU is working on mandates that will ensure EV manufacturers recycle their old used batteries. French car maker Renault, is recycling all of its electric car batteries and Volkswagen is planning to do the same and has opened a dedicated pilot recycling plant in Salzgitter, Germany.
Currently the dated EU Battery Directive from 2006 stipulates that at least 50% of batteries must be recycled, but that includes the casings, plastics and housing making it a relatively easy target to hit. Recycling the cell metals, processing them for re-use in new batteries is the bigger challenge.
Battery Recycling Facility
Many countries already have extended producer responsibility (EP), meaning OEMs could be ultimately responsible for retired EV batteries. So, what happens to an old battery when it heads off for recycling? In Volkswagen’s pilot plant, the battery is firstly completely discharged, any remaining charge is spent before deconstruction commences. Residual energy in these batteries can also be recovered by discharging them into battery storage units on site in the recycling center.
The battery pack is then disassembled and broken down into their individual battery modules, each containing hundreds of individual battery cells. The cells are shredded into granules and then dried to remove any of the liquid and gel electrolyte. Special separators then sieve the various metals including lithium, nickel, manganese, copper, cobalt, and the aluminum cell casing. Magnetic separators then collect the different metals by weight. Any plastics, such as housing or cable coatings are separated from the metals by the magnets. The various metals are ground down into powders for refinement, preparation, and reuse.
Former co-founder and Tesla CTO, J. B. Straubel is now CEO for Redwood Materials, a start-up aiming to develop technologies to recycle the future millions of used batteries. Redwood uses a combination of methods to extract used elements from batteries: pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy. With the pyro method, unwanted plastics and organic materials are burned from the battery while with the hydro method, lithium-ion cells are soaked in a strong acid to separate the metals. Redwood’s technique uses any remaining residual energy from the old batteries to power the heating process.
While battery recycling today can recover as little as just 5% of the valuable materials, Redwood claims it could recover between 95% and 98% of the nickel, cobalt, copper, aluminium and graphite material.
Battery Recycling Facility
Another start-up, Canadian Li-Cycle, uses a different approach to Redwood, by focusing on the hydro method to extract the various materials.
Battery Resources claims to recover over 90% of the battery through their ‘closed loop’ system with a combination of hydro and direct recycling ‘rebuilding’ the cathode materials at an atomic level.
In Europe, Elemental Holding is constructing a €182 million dedicated facility for EV battery recycling in Poland. Part funded by the European Union, the facility will be one of the first in the world dedicated to EV battery recycling.
Tesla itself announced in 2020 its own plans to develop a battery recycling system which they claim will be quite different from other automakers’ approach. It is thought Tesla will be developing its own closed loop battery recycling process; currently Tesla relies mainly on 3rd party recyclers.
Regardless of the process before any of these recycled metals can be reused, further refinement and processing is required. New techniques, known as direct recovery, aims to recover cathode materials without destroying the crystalline nanostructure (created during the original lithium preparation). Industrialisation of battery recycling for use in new batteries also offers to reduce the overall carbon footprint of electric cars, cutting down on the ‘mine to wheel’ CO2 cost.
According to the Institute of Electric and Electronics Engineers, IEEE, there are estimated to be over 100 companies worldwide already working on or planning to recycle lithium-ion batteries. Battery recycling will be a very lucrative, enormous business estimated to be worth as much as $30 billion by 2040. Recycling is a problem the world can and is solving at the earliest stages of this electric revolution, it bodes well for a sustainable future.
