The problem with recycling electric car batteries

For years, we have been promised that batteries from electric vehicles are recyclable. With eye-watering efficiencies of more than 90% of recovered materials such as nickel, cobalt and lithium. In a lab environment yes, but are these numbers actually achievable on a commercial scale?

#PlanetA #EVbattery #recycling

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Credits:
Reporter: Kai Steinecke
Camera: Florian Kroker
Video Editor: Markus Mörtz
Supervising Editors: Malte Rohwer-Kahlmann & Michael Trobridge
Fact Check: Kirsten Funck
Thumbnail: Em Chabridon

Read More:
Different types of battery recycling
Current challenges and opportunities of lithium-ion battery recycling
Forecast lithium-ion battery recycling market

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:50 Mechanical Battery Recycling
02:27 (Black Mass) Chemical Purification
05:58 Problems with Upscaling
10:27 Conclusion

[ua]

Here in Ukraine we are buying lots of damaged(totaled) Tesla cars from US. Some are restored others are dismantled to parts. Batteries often reused as home batteries or rebuilt as battery packs for FPV drones sent to unwanted guests coming from the east.

[tommclean]

Interesting! If battery manufacturers were made financially responsible for the recycling then there would be more motivation to standardize batteries for the recycling process.

[johndoyle]

I worked in chemical recycling for 30 years, rogue materials in your inputs can play havoc with the process and can be very difficult to detect.
We used shredders at the start of the process which worked very well until a drum of waste from say a car repair shop had a starter motor dropped in it and kiss goodbye to your shredder blades.
The recycling industry is very innovative, and I am sure when there are enough scrap batteries available then the process will be sorted.

[CrackDavidson]

H2S is not sulfuric acid (So4), but hydrogen sulfide, which evolves when sulfuric acid (or sulfates) is reduced in low oxygen environments.

[samuxan]

The process shown here are not unlike the process to turn the ore that's mined into the original raw materials, that's something that rarely is talked about. the main reason this can be more expensive than mining is that the process are not in scale yet

[MDUD]

I work in One of European battery recycling company and i can confirm that it’s quite a lot of a process :)

[tlister]

I worked in R&D on this topic over 5 years. It should first be stated that Li ion batteries have been recycled from portable devices for many years using pyrometallurgy (smelting). The hydromet process described here is fairly conventional and nothing usual, those “hazards” are fairly common and manageable in industry. There are more chemically efficient methods that have been developed recently and you really need to be skilled in the art and read a lot. The main problem I heard was really the supply of batteries from eVs to drive the economics. Unlike a mine where the source of material is well defined, the source material for batteries must be sourced and I saw vertical integration and partnerships with manufacturers to source those batteries as important. There are many recycling companies battling it out right now. The dynamic nature of battery technology is also important, metal thrifting will be employed to lower costs and cheaper storage materials will be developed. This lowers the value of scrap. Most of the challenges lie in the economics and market, not technology.

[jeffheiner]

Thank you for sharing what the actual process really looks like. We need to figure out how to make batteries, that are designed for recycling. maybe make recycling easier and safer for the workers.
But recycling in general is a big step!

[bartmannn]

Here is a quite crazy idea: Develop und upscale it with constant government subsidies. In Germany, there are massive subsidies for coal, kerosine, I think even for the car industry.

[owenhill-vfko]

I work at a new state of the art battery recycler. While I can't go into details this isn't close to new technology.

[jeremygibbs]

The fact so many batteries are findong a second life and being reused as home battery storage is really good! Certainly the question/challenge is in having an industry ready to recycle those batteries when they inevatibly need to be recycled.

[DougGrinbergs]

1:46 blackmass 8:43 many battery chemistries 10:12 old EV batteries being used in second-life applications, 👍 delaying need for recycling

[matthewwakefield]

A lot of the problems you mentioned are reduced when you take SMSs approach (the plant you showed footage of) and sell the plants to the manufacturer. Eg Mercedes has a base level of feedstock, deconstructing their own packs is standard, and they are users of the end product and only need to make a smaller profit on the process as it’s part of an integrated lifecycle with more stable economics.

[ianthehunter]

Alright, who paid you to post this? Like there's no way Vox uploads same thing within the same minute.

[atehrani]

Laws should mandate battery form factors just as we have for 12v. Similarly 12v batteries have a high recycling rate, we can do this for EV batteries. Making them a closed loop

[vernonbrechin]

I hope there is more emphasis placed on repurposing used batteries. There are still new lithium battery chemistries that may soon be marketed. One includes sulfur.

[ShieldAre]

If there aren't that many batteries to recycle yet, and the materials aren't that expensive, that's actually sort of good news, means there is more time to spend on perfecting the recycling technology, and we aren't anywhere close to hitting the limits of how many EVs can be made. A lot of people in the past claimed that there isn't such and such material to transform all cars to electric, for example. Whether or not that is true, we are clearly not yet hitting those limits, as the materials are still so cheap as to not make recycling that profitable.

[kambleji]

Battery manufacturing and recycling standards and policy should be implemented by the central governments across the world. It will make setting up of battery manufacturing, R&D and recycling easy for any company in the country

[Netherlands]

So how does recycling compare to mining? Surely to extract high purity metals from ore is even more difficult

[AKrn]

At least someone is being honest about the challenges.