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Earth Technology

The World Needs To Crack Battery Recycling, Fast (wired.co.uk) 97

As batteries start to pile up, carmakers, battery companies and researchers are trying to save them from ending up in landfills. From a report: Recyclers are primarily interested in extracting the valuable metals and minerals in the cells. Getting to these materials is complex and dangerous: After removing the steel casing, the battery pack needs to be unbundled into cells carefully, to avoid puncturing any hazardous materials. The electrolyte, a liquid whose job it is to move lithium ions between the cathode and anode, can catch fire or even explode if heated. Only once the pack has been dismantled, recyclers can safely extract the conductive lithium, nickel, copper, and cobalt.

Used in the cathode, cobalt is the most sought-after material used in batteries. In its raw form, the rare, bluish-grey metal is predominantly sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where miners work in perilous conditions. The world's major electric car manufacturers are already moving away from cobalt, deterred by the human rights abuses, shortages in the supply chain. That raises the question of whether recyclers will still find it worthwhile to dismantle newer battery types lacking the most valuable ingredients. "When you move to more sustainable materials, and lower cost materials, the incentive to recycle and recover them diminishes," says Jenny Baker, an energy storage expert at Swansea University. She likens this to a dilemma in consumer electronics: It is often cheaper to buy a new mobile phone than to get it fixed or recycled.

[...] In a first step, recyclers typically shred the cathode and anode materials of spent batteries into a powdery mixture, the so-called black mass. In the board game analogy, this would be the first slide down on a snake, Gavin Harper, a research fellow at the University of Birmingham, explains. The black mass can then be processed in one of two ways to extract its valuable components. One method, called pyrometallurgy, involves smelting the black mass in a furnace powered with fossil fuels. It's a relatively cheap method but a lot of lithium, aluminium, graphite and manganese is lost in the process. Another method, hydrometallurgy, leaches the metals out of the black mass by dissolving it in acids and other solvents. This method, Harper says, would correspond to a shorter snake in the board game, because more material can be recovered: you fall back, but not by as many squares as when using pyrometallurgy. The process, however, consumes a lot of energy and produces toxic gases and wastewater.

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The World Needs To Crack Battery Recycling, Fast

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  • Money down the drain (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday November 25, 2021 @04:53AM (#62019739) Homepage Journal

    Who is throwing batteries into landfill? That's money down the drain, those cells are worth quit a bit today. Have a look on sites like eBay and AliExpress, there are loads of used cells that people recycle. You can buy either the cells on their own or cells that have been tested and built into packs.

    Recycling is already a huge business.

    • by Tx ( 96709 ) on Thursday November 25, 2021 @06:25AM (#62019869) Journal

      That's re-use, not recycling, at least in the context of TFA. Yes, you can re-use cells for a while beyond their prime, but eventually they get to the point of having zero usable capacity, and at that point they need to be scrapped or recycled for their materials, which is what the article is talking about. And the point of the article is that with the number of EVs on the road growing rapidly, so will the number of batteries getting to that point, and we are not currently anywhere near equipped to recycle batteries on the necessary scale.

    • by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Thursday November 25, 2021 @06:34AM (#62019889)

      Who is throwing batteries into landfill?

      We used to recycle aluminum cans, back when the metal was worth far less.

      We used to charge deposits for glass, and people used to actually return the glass for that deposit. It's amazing that isn't worth the effort anymore, but risking you life for a click or a like online somehow is. "Go collect bottles kid...you'll live longer." wasn't advice the older generation thought they would ever need to give out.

      Human starvation is still a pretty big thing, and yet how many metric tons of consumable food are thrown away every day?

      Maybe we should stop asking, why humans are doing so much of that Waste thing. As a species, we're kind of known for it now. Along with Mass Ignorance.

      Recycling is already a huge business.

      Yeah? If that were true, we wouldn't desperately need 10x more of it on this planet.

      • Repeat after me. The world operates the way it does because the people in charge want it that way.

        • by hogleg ( 1147911 )
          The PIC want to make money, we all agree on that. The negative consequences were not intentional, but having said that, the negative consequences shouldn't necessarily get in the way of them making money. The PIC have no immediate pressing need to change their behaviors. They will be the last to suffer from the mess they created. Money buys a nice bubble world to live in.
        • Repeat after me. The world operates the way it does because the people in charge want it that way.

          Being "in charge" does not automatically make you a good leader, or even remotely competent for the task.

          As if I really have to shine a light on US leadership when that entity shines like the runway illuminating the path to Prime Example.

      • > We used to recycle aluminum cans, back when the metal was worth far less.

        Aluminum cans are still recycled. Nobody is throwing out the aluminum. The "problem" is domestic aluminum processors are focusing on different alloys that are worth more, causing a domestic shortage of the type of aluminum used in beverage cans. Domestic recycling of aluminum cans is down because the price of the material - specifically alloys used in vehicles - is up. Industry is following the money.

        > We used to charge deposit

        • Second, glass bottles were basically never recycled into new bottles, or even into new glass products.
          If they re collected via a deposit: they are. And before the get recycled, they are reused. Sometimes several 100 times.

          Glass collected in containers, where you throw in bottles, is separated by colour: white, brown, green. That is usually recycled just back in to bottles etc. as well.

          Sometimes, as you say, the quality is not good enough, then the old glass gets mixed into newly made glass.

        • by necro81 ( 917438 )

          Aluminum cans are still recycled. Nobody is throwing out the aluminum.

          I’ll be sure to keep that in mind as I pass by empty cans of Bud Light and White Claw when I’m running down the road.

        • In parts of Europe, glass bottles were reused. Also plastic bottles. The plastic was considerably thicker than single use bottles, thicker even than current SodaStream bottles.
          At some point the economics became that it made more sense to shred used bottles instead of transporting empty bottles. Plastic bottles became alot thinner, and rocket bottle enthusiasts cried at losing their cheap supply of strong bottles.

          • Glass bottles were also reused for many years in the US. That was back when most bottling was local; the big soda companies used a franchise model where they had regional affiliates that operated local bottling plants, and the beer market was dominated by local brands with local breweries. The empties were only carted a short distance back to the bottling plant so the economics of bottle reuse made sense.

            That model started to fade after WWII, though it remained the dominant model of distribution in some are

      • We used to charge deposits for glass, and people used to actually return the glass for that deposit.
        We are still doing that. Deposite 8c till up to 50cents, depending on bottle type. Plastic usually 25cents and aluminium cans also 25cents.

    • by Monoman ( 8745 )

      Right and I think there are at least two former Tesla employees that saw opportunity in the recycling sector.

      https://www.redwoodmaterials.c... [redwoodmaterials.com] and https://americanbatterytechnol... [americanba...nology.com]

      https://www.fastcompany.com/90... [fastcompany.com]

    • ... and the cell harvesters already open the packs and separate all the cells, so that removes one of the steps mentioned as difficult in the article.

      Nissan Leaf batteries appear to be a bit fragile, because there seems to be a large industry of people buying up the "dead" packs and assembling new Leaf batterypacks out of the best cells, and stationary PV storage packs our of the medium grade cells.

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      In my area, we have to go far away to recycle SINGLED USED batteries. Plenty of local places for used rechargeable batteries though. Why are singled used batteries harder to disposed compared to rechargeable batteries? :(

  • by Thorfinn.au ( 1140205 ) on Thursday November 25, 2021 @05:06AM (#62019757)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery

    The metals are nickel, which is mined in Australia, Canada, New Caledonia (part of France), and iron (most of the planet).

    quoting wikipediaThe nickel–iron battery (NiFe battery) is a rechargeable battery having nickel(III) oxide-hydroxide positive plates and iron negative plates, with an electrolyte of potassium hydroxide. The active materials are held in nickel-plated steel tubes or perforated pockets. It is a very robust battery which is tolerant of abuse, (overcharge, overdischarge, and short-circuiting) and can have very long life even if so treated.[7] It is often used in backup situations where it can be continuously charged and can last for more than 20 years. Due to its low specific energy, poor charge retention, and high cost of manufacture, other types of rechargeable batteries have displaced the nickel–iron battery in most applications.

    • Where does the article mention Ni-Fe batteries? Even your quote refers to how they are not used in most modern systems.

      • Priced at about the same (energy storage basis) as lithium and last twice as long.
        • Again that's not the point? Energy density is what people care about though it seems like these batteries are still decent for maybe a UPC or small in-house solar grid.

          • They are good for adding to your house solar system, but terrible for a car of phone (use Lithium here). The operational life of 20+ and some have done 50 years is also good for your house and for adding to remote systems to provide charging for a car. The other issue is they are not maintenance free, they need electrolyte top ups monthly/quarterly.
            • Right. The energy density is the problem with a phone right? Not the maintenance . Same for basically any "mobile" system, including cars, airplanes, and ships. I wonder, with ships they could maybe be acceptable due to cost and lifetime?

              The one solution for all clearly doesn't seem the right way to go with batteries. So I certainly agree solutions like these should be in the mix.

    • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

      "Due to its low specific energy, poor charge retention, and high cost of manufacture"

      Which is why its useless for electric vehicles and no one is using it in them. It might have a place as fixed grid storage but thats about it.

    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery

      I'll see your Wikipedia link and raise you another: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. According to that chart Lithium Cobalt batteries have more than four times the energy density by volume of the formulation you're championing. Where you have lots of space available - wind and solar installations come to mind - nickel-iron batteries may be viable. In cars? Not so much.

      And at a self-discharge rate of 20-30 percent a month, (info from your own Wikipedia link), you'd better make sure your charge level is up

      • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Thursday November 25, 2021 @07:37AM (#62020003)

        And at a self-discharge rate of 20-30 percent a month ... how much energy is being wasted by that high a self-discharge rate...

        If used as a grid-scale day-to-night power shifter, there will be 30 cycles in a month, and 30% of a single charge is wasted, which is 1% of the shifted power.

        The self-discharge rate is worse than lithium but not a show-stopper.

        The 65% round-trip efficiency is a much bigger problem. Lithium batteries have an RTE of over 90%.

    • by Cyberax ( 705495 )

      The nickel–iron battery (NiFe battery)

      NiFe batteries have even worse energy density than lead-acid. They are completely impractical for large-scale applications, because the amount of materials is stupendous. Iron and nickel are cheap, but not THAT cheap.

      • Iron and nickel are cheap, but not THAT cheap.

        Iron is cheap. Nickel is not:

        Iron = $600 / ton
        nickel = $20,000 / ton
        lead = $2100 /ton

        Source: 20 second Google search

        • Ni-Fe beat Pd-Acid as they out live by several cycles so that 10* price advantage is gone.
          Now to google some prices.
          • Here is Aus NiFe cost 30% more that a Pd-Acid system. Lithium are the smallest and good for 4000 cycles
            Pd-acid are done at about 7 to 10 years
            NiFe need monthly maintenance and once a decade electrolyte replacement but otherwise they keep on going
  • You can't unscramble an egg. Or a battery, so it seems.
    • It's hard to believe that the valuable materials in these used batteries are more difficult to extract than when they were buried in the ground. But there obviously is more to it than my simplistic take I guess.
  • In most big cities in europe public transport is good (this doesn't apply to most of them in north america). Outside of the cities - not so much , so anyone living in a rural area or small town currently has little choice but to use a car as there's little to no bus service and the nearest station is miles away. Sort out decent PT and you could reduce car usage and hence pollution by an enormous amount. Yes it'll require subsidy but some things matter more than profit.

    • by jmccue ( 834797 )

      Came here to say this. How about subsidising public transport with car each auto purchase, battery disposal and gas purchase. And eliminate oil subsidizes.

      The age of this type personal transport is really just about over, but like crack addicts, people are still trying to keep it going. Yes very hard to get out of, but time to face reality.

      All that is needed is large investment in public transport an re-tool cities for walking and bicycling. This should be part of the push to reduce global warming.

      • All that's needed is an utterly complete change to the system and an amazing amount spent in retrofit.

        I suppose one could say that about almost anything if they don't want to think to much about it.
    • by dbialac ( 320955 )
      You've clearly never been to Europe. Nearly every town is interconnected by public transportation and buses. The buses go from town to town. Taxi rides complete your journey when needed and are cheap. All of this is there because towns and cities are built densely. Almost everyone lives in apartments, not houses, so it is easy to walk across a small town in a few minutes and a medium sized city in about an hour. For those medium sized and bigger cities, buses are everywhere. American cities are not built de
      • by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Thursday November 25, 2021 @12:09PM (#62020689) Homepage

        "You've clearly never been to Europe"

        I live in europe you clown.

        "Nearly every town is interconnected by public transportation and buses. The buses go from town to town"

        Yes they do, but they're generally not frequent enough to replace a car for most people.

        "Go browse with the yellow guy from Google Maps and see how drastic the differences are"

        Wow, thanks for the heads up there, clearly you're an expert.

        "Mass transit doesn't work well in the US because we are spread out"

        Yet oddly it works in china which is almost as big as the US. Where there's a will.... Your governments have used that as an excuse for decades not to bother to invest in PT. Its time to change the record.

  • I know making something illegal doesn't prevent it, but it should prevent it from happening at scale.

    Pass a law making EV manufacturers responsible for the recycling of their batteries in perpetuity, with meaningful fines for non-compliance, and you'll see them solve this problem in short order. And frankly, they are who should solve it anyway.

    Tesla has got their own battery recycling facility, the rest can do the same, or contract with someone else. But either way, we must hold them accountable for recycli

    • by dbialac ( 320955 )
      Never mind that the cost of the recycled materials is substantially higher than getting the metals new.
    • Everyone just pays some overseas recycling company to handle it and they dump them in the landfill where the government doesn't care about enforcing those kinds of laws or can be paid enough to look the other way.

      If you want the government to incentivize a solution you'd probably just want to add taxes to the raw materials to make their recovery more desirable. Of course this means you'd need tariffs on anything imported from other countries and it makes a few other messes because it makes fossil fuels m
  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Thursday November 25, 2021 @07:51AM (#62020039)

    The premise of the article is the need to reclaim the cobalt in the anode. The problem with this is they are completely ignoring battery advances that exclude the need for cobalt. [utexas.edu] Even actively used battery technology uses a tiny fraction of the cobalt that it used to. Battery recycling will be needed eventually but it's not needed immediately nor it is needed for cobalt reclamation.

    Furthermore, Wired conveniently forgot to mention that EV batteries don't go into landfills. "Bad" EV batteries are used to make grid-scale batteries and last another decade or two because it doesn't matter if they only storage 10% of their original capacity since energy density doesn't matter in a grid-scale battery.

    The only lithium-ion batteries going into landfills are from consumer devices, especially smartphones. Don't blame EV makers for the waste other companies make.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday November 25, 2021 @08:56AM (#62020131) Homepage Journal

      It's high time that the EU mandated phone battery replacement be cheap (say max 20 Euro) and that phone batteries are recycled.

      • Mandating all products make batteries removable (not even replaceable, just removable) would do wonders. There are lots of products that have gone the non-removable battery route and they are all getting thrown away.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I think replacement is important too. I've had toothbrushes where you can remove the battery, but only in a way that damages the device so you aren't tempted to replace it.

        • Ok *magic*, everything now has a removable battery.

          How does this solve the battery recycling problem? I mean I get you, that would mitigate the need to recycle thins that use batteries, but the article is literally about battery recycling.

          • Ok *magic*, everything now has a removable battery.

            How does this solve the battery recycling problem?

            Solve? No, this makes it possible to recycle batteries. Right now a lot of batteries are going into landfills because they are hidden and inaccessible.

            Simply, you have to first collect batteries to recycle in order to recycle batteries.

      • How do you mandate it be cheap AND recyclable? Somewhere in the chain the recycling will have to be paid for. Recycling sometimes pays for itself, but that's when you pick out the most valuable easy to obtain parts and toss the rest back in the trash.

  • by Ed_1024 ( 744566 ) on Thursday November 25, 2021 @08:16AM (#62020073)

    OK, I do not run a battery recycling company, but I would have thought that having all the ingredients in the correct proportions to make new batteries delivered to you in bulk (which is what old batteries are) would make the business pretty profitable.

    The alternative is to dig the precursors out of the ground and go through all the refining stages, which on initial inspection appears to be more energy/cost inefficient and reliant on third parties than plain recycling?

    Put it this way, if a inexhaustible deposit of lithium, cobalt, iron and other ingredients, in the sort of concentrations you find in batteries, was discovered somewhere on the Earth, people would be fighting over it...

    • by Mspangler ( 770054 ) on Thursday November 25, 2021 @10:11AM (#62020297)

      The elements might be in the correct proportions, but they are in the wrong, as in contaminated, materials. After they are dissolved out of the defunct battery they are polluted with other remnants, or in the wrong oxidation state. Returning them to the proper condition for a new battery is not technically difficult, but it's messy. There are waste streams to deal with if you live in the developed world that is not China.

      It's not just batteries that are hard to recycle. Look at plastic. Even HDPE is hard to get back to prime grade. You can only use so much recycled plastic in the next milk jug.

      The other issue is cost. They stopped collecting glass here because the cost of hauling to a bottle plant exceeded the value of the glass. The nearest bottle plant is a long way off.

      So for the batteries, which costs less, recycling the battery domestically under EPA rules while fighting off NIMBYs, shipping the battery to a third world country for processing out of sight of Greenpeace, or swinging the whips a little harder in the Congo?

      PS, I once worked in the mining industry and had a front row seat as the environmentalists shut down as much as they could. The environmentalists even fight tooth and nail against copper mines when their dream of an all-electric economy requires huge amounts of new copper. Apparently they expect other countries to trade their copper to us in return for TikTok clicks?

      • The environmentalists even fight tooth and nail against copper mines when their dream of an all-electric economy requires huge amounts of new copper.

        One would respect environmentalists a lot more if they showed any signs of being reasonable. But apparently electricity comes magically out of the plug, food appears magically on grocery store shelves, and all of it should happen with zero environmental impact. Solar power and batteries, but don't mine rare earths. Generate power, be CO2 neutral, but no nucl

    • OK, I do not run a battery recycling company, but I would have thought that having all the ingredients in the correct proportions to make new batteries delivered to you in bulk (which is what old batteries are) would make the business pretty profitable.

      Part of the problem is that there hasn't BEEN a lot of used lithium chemistry batteries "in bulk" until just about now. Appliance batteries are small and scattered, and must be gathered. The early generations of giant lithium-based auto power packs from the

  • We were promised, as I recall, extremely high capacity vanadium-based batteries.

    Getting back to the article, however, we have the question of how to extract metals without damaging the graphite. That's an interesting challenge, as the most obvious ways of separating out the metals efficiently will convert graphite into less useful forms of carbon. If we're just focussing on the metals, however, I don't see why this would be too difficult. There must be all kinds of methods, not just the two listed.

    • We were promised, as I recall, extremely high capacity vanadium-based batteries.

      They're being deployed now. A quick google search identified one going in in Hawaii, another (not the first) in Australia.

      With a total installed cost in the ballpark of $1,500/kWh and an expected lifetime of 20-25 years they might be having some competition from the plethora of other chemistries, especially several lithium variants, that are being heavily developed and widely deployed, achieving great economy of scale and attra

  • by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Thursday November 25, 2021 @08:58AM (#62020135) Homepage

    to mandate standards to which new batteries must be constructed - these will make recycling of batteries easier. Manufacturers will not do this by themselves if it would add a penny more to price - so mandated standards mean that everyone needs to pay a bit more, but increased costs like this are what we need to pay today to avoid much greater environmental costs in decades to come.

  • It'd have been done decades ago.

    • <quote><p>It'd have been done decades ago.</p></quote>

      Cracking recycling is never going to be easy.

      But it is darn nigh impossible until you have sufficient material to recycle and get to economies of scale <- this is at least reason why it wasn't "done decades ago".

      The "problem" in all this is that the batteries in EVs are lasting so long ... which, when you think about it is a nice problem to have.
      • by Chas ( 5144 )

        The thing is, we're overflowing with LION batteries as it is.
        There's over 180K METRIC TONS of LION battery waste TODAY.
        And less than 5% of it is recycled.

  • Robotics built these. Use robotics to disassemble. Then smelt using waste nuclear heat, combined with electricity from the nuclear plant.
  • When the world has a problem with products being pumped out by profit making companies, it seems like a good time to regulate just a little bitâ¦.
  • Cars should get their power from the road on any highway. Only on local streets might they need a battery.

  • by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Thursday November 25, 2021 @12:37PM (#62020763) Journal
    Let us take every thing the article claims at face value. Several million tons of batteries will pile up. There will be no valuable materials left in it to make it worthwhile to recover or recycle anything. New battery will be cheap so there is no second life for auto batteries coming out of service. They all will end up in land fills. OK.

    So what are we comparing that situation with? Millions of tons of oil is burnt, its waste products, sulfur, nitrous oxides are all thrown into the atmosphere we all breathe. You can't avoid it. The carbon dioxide emitted is triggering climate change.

    Compared to the status quo ante, million dead batteries in the land fill are way better.

    • Yes, that's what I've been saying about these people complaining about lithium battery. We need to compare to the "waste" generated from gasoline. An EV have at most a few hundred kilograms of battery that usually last the lifetime of the car. Even if it is thrown to landfill, that just a large chunk of battery in the landfill. Compared that to several dozen tonnes of CO2 and other nasty pollutant from the tailpipe over the lifetime of an engine, that is several orders of magnitude less pollution.
  • ... the eco- and resource-balance into everything we build and consume.
    Now. 10%-20% every 12 months, so that we get rid of any hidden eco/environment/resource subsidy in 8 to 12 years, on a global scale.
    Recycling whatever is worth it will come naturally out of that.

    We are way too late already, it's 20 past 12. Humanity is decades into a severe depletion of ecological structure, fauna and flora of this planet and the living environment it provides for us. We are screwed already as it is, but if we finally

  • Auto and Battery manufacturers to buy back the old batteries/whole vehicles (deposit plus pickup and/or shipping on them). You can not let them keep building new problems until they are required to deal with the problems they have already profited from by their actions.
    Step 2 It is on them to figure out how to deal with problems of their own creation or stop creating problems. As long as they can dump the problems and cost on others to goose their profits they will. That is why they are really rich and mos
  • These costs need to be included in the lifecycle costs and environmental impacts of EVs. Just because big government likes them is no reason to give them a pass.

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