What happens to used electric car batteries?
wired.com
wired.com
Personally, I think long-form writers need to start including abstracts. If I'm going to spend half an hour reading something, I'd like to know what it's about before I commit the time. If no abstract seems adequate to capture the breadth of a long form article's ramblings, then it lacks focus and should be revised.
When I read an article about about ... fishing in Alaska ... I was btw born in the last millenia and had a pretty normal childhood. But if you dig out school colleagues of mine you will find somebody who will tell you I was a strange kid in school .
5 minutes later I have still not read anything about fishing in Alaska.
Feels like complete filler material to me, probably to increase "engagement".
I turned off the content blocker and counted 6 ads within the length of this article.
This is the only information about what actually happens to batteries. It is very imprecise. And limited to one company
"When batteries can’t be fixed or reused, the company recycles some at its onsite facility. It also stores batteries. Lots of them. SNT’s main warehouse in Oklahoma City holds hundreds of electric car batteries, stacked on shelves that jut 30 feet into the air. With the Bolt recall, GM will send SNT many more."
Are water lines going to be adequate to contain a warehouse full of lithium batteries on fire?
Drinking coffee, by the window, in the shade watching the sun in the garden... Take your time!
>In Oklahoma City, the batteries in the SNT warehouse mostly came from cars that are still under warranty, which means the automakers are responsible for them. Tyler Helps, the company’s head of business development, says automakers are paying SNT to keep their old batteries because they don’t know what the used battery market is going to look like and whether the materials inside the battery might be more valuable in the future. “So instead of the automakers saying, ‘I'm going to go and dispose of those materials,’ they say, ‘I’m just going to hold onto it,’” he says.
I am not convinced of the analysis, it is more likely that the car makers know that the cost of disposing properly (and in large volumes) such batteries today would be astronomical (let's say - only for the sake of reasoning - US$ 2,000 per car) and prefer to pay (say) US$ 50/year to SNT and postpone the problem by - still say - 10 or 20 years (and most probably they already charged you, inside the price of your new electric vehicle, some US$ 3,000, to stay on the safe side)
In a nutshell, you don't want right now to actually own an electric car past its warranty, you'd be better served by long renting or similar, as there is a concrete risk that if/when your batteries die, there won't be (yet) an effective way to get rid of them cleanly and you may have to pay a non-trivial amount of money for disposing of the battery.
Additionally, it seems to me like this opens a (large) can of worms when it comes to used vehicles.
Will there be specialized technicians/organizations that will give you some form of warranty on the batteries?
Batteries are resource gold mines with most material readily available (the casing, for example, would be the easiest thing to recycle).
Further, simple recycling (burn everything) of the inner parts is almost certainly worth it just to reclaim the current contents of nickel and cobalt.
What's not clear is if other resources can be reclaimed or if this can be taken further. Can we also reclaim the electrolyte (The substance between the anode and cathode)? Can we do all this without smelting down parts?
That's the unknown. That's also what manufactures are saying when they say "we don't know if this will be more or less valuable in the future." Because, as you can imagine, if recycling is simply applying a chemical wash to the electrolyte and reusing everything else, then you've saved $1000s of dollars avoiding making a new battery.
If, on the other hand, that's not possible, then smelting will still happen as that reclaims expensive materials (primarily nickel and cobalt) at a fraction of the cost of mining them fresh.
In other words, we know how to recycle battery materials. We don't know if we can recycle all of the battery materials. As a result, battery manufactures are just waiting until the cost of manufacturing new batteries becomes cost prohibitive without starting a recycling plant.
My question was rather different, much more simple/practical.
Today (not tomorrow, not ten years from now) I own a "normal" ICE car and for some reasons it breaks beyond any possible repair.
Currently (and it may depend on countries) I can sell the wreck to someone authorized to dismantle it and get a few hundred bucks for it or - in the worst case - pay someone to dismantle/recycle it a few hundred bucks (and I can - within limits - choose among many companies that provide this services according to the current Law).
What would happen (still today) if the car was an electric one?
Tomorrow(ish): We recycle more of it.
But your question in many ways is less practical. Statistically cars have lifespans that we can chart out rather well. We can see that we have X tons of old batteries today, and on some tomorrow we'll have X+Y tons of old batteries. Which is important. Industry tends to scale. Working with 100 tons of material may not be an economical in a batch process. But when you have a million tons of the same materials you build an entire facility around said process and the small efficiencies add up at every step.
There's a pretty big second hand market for salvaged batteries. Except in the case of catastrophic failure, these batteries are either being stored for later recycling, or being sold outright for a second use unchanged.
They are not ending up in the junk yard. [1]
[1] http://store.evtv.me/proddetail.php?prod=TeslaBattModule
Who (names of the companies) today (not tomorrow, not in ten years time) will pick up my wrecked electric car (and its batteries)?
For an old, traditional, ICE car I open the local phone directory and can find a handful of car wreckers that are authorized to scrap the car.
What do I do if the car is an electric one?
So, pull up the phone directory and call any one of those wreckers, ask them if they handle EVs. All of them will say yes.
Here (Italy, but I believe that several EU countries are in this same situation) they won't touch an electric vehicle with a ten foot pole.
They are not authorized to handle or store lithium batteries (that are considered dangerous wastes) and don't have the (safety) qualifications nor tools to handle mid-range voltages.
There are in the making some new EU norms (and investments) related to "circular economy" for the EV batteries:
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_21_...
but right now they are e-waste, the so-called RAEE/WEEE, and while there is a code 160005 (that is for batteries coming from phones, notebooks, etc.) EV batteries are likely to fall in the 160215 code (which is dangerous parts removed from assemblies).
We are talking (if you can find anyone that will dismantle them) of roughly 4/5 Euro/kg for the disposal fees.
The only difference is the battery cells might be stored instead of immediately recycled. (though, already there's a pretty hopping market for second hand battery packs from salvaged vehicles. Lots of people like to turn those into energy storage for homes/etc).
The simple practical answer is that storing batteries, right now, makes more sense than trying to immediately salvage them. Not because they are unsalvageable, but because future expected salvaging operations are expected to reuse more of the material.
(My cofounder and I launched a company to disassemble the batteries robotically, if you're interested in helping us build it, please message me).
If you can tolerate the risk, a used, out-of-warranty ev can be pretty economical. You'd want to do something to evaluate the condition of the battery, and then accept that there is some probability of a battery failure that will not be worth fixing.
Also, every battery that is produced should have a serial number on it. These are not things that can just be dumped in a hole and forgotten. The manufacturer of that battery should be responsible for it from the day it's made to the day it's recycled.
Side note: You know those Tide Pod plastic buckets? Those are recyclable. The refill bags of pods, however, are made of a plastic that is not recyclable - so you buy the bag to create less waste and actually end up creating more. This is the sort of stupidity that shouldn't be legally allowed in the future.
Imagine trying to dissassemble a 20 yo EV battery with rust and salt bridges everywhere and not die in the process.
Be precise with legislation. For example, some States forbid landfill of whole tires. This led to collection of per-tire disposal fee and the landfills purchasing new wheel loader to scoop whole tires into new shredder which uses new conveyor to pile up the tire shreds. Wheel loader then scoops shreds and sprinkles the shreds into landfill.
https://blog.epa.gov/2015/08/26/improperly-stored-tires-lead...
Are those buckets recyclable as in "stamped with the recycling symbol" or "actually will get recycled if you drop it in the recycling bin"? I've heard that most plastics, recyclable or not, are not recycled in practice due to cost, contamination, or lack of demand. (If that's true, then the bag is better than the bucket because it's less plastic.)
• The tub is recyclable. Please ensure that your area's recycling programs support the recycling of this type of container.
• The lid component is recyclable only in the few communities that have recycling programs for this type of material.
• The bag is not recyclable.
https://pgconsumersupport.secure.force.com/CarehubStandalone...
Both the tub and the bag have less carbon footprint than a cotton bag, glass container, or metal tin. Likely less than transporting liquid detergent (though more than powder in cardboard)
Anyways, what's your point? They could use cardboard just as easily. And that still doesn't excuse plastics being used today that are non recyclable.
Recycled cardboard has a higher (3x) energy footprint and water waste than pe products.
This is an interesting comparison. https://www.egglandsbest.com/exceptional-quality/sustainabil...
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[1]https://scitechdaily.com/big-breakthrough-for-massless-energ...
No affiliation, but I want to try them out after they popped up in my youtube ads following searches on exactly these kind of products. I do not know if they are good but zt least they tick the sustainability part I was looking for.
Same with dishwasher detergent. It /used/ to be powder. There's still powder now easy to find, at least, and it works perfectly fine.
An 80 kWh battery, say, that has lost half its capacity would have been enough to get me through most outages I've seen since moving into my current house 15 years ago without me having to even try to reduce power during the outage. The one or two outages where that would not have been enough, it would have been sufficient to just dress warmer, turn the thermostat down a little, and avoid doing laundry.
I'd be interested in this as long as the price per kWh of the degraded battery is significantly lower than the price for a new battery with the same capacity. The degraded battery is going to be good for much less cycles than a new battery of the same capacity, so it should cost less.
I thought that a lot of the battery failures in EVs was due to the failures of individual cells (like AA batteries) within modules, which make it impossible for the BMS to balance power between modules. There was a recent youtube video where an old Model S had its range dramatically reduced to less than 25% because a module had 2 bad cells. The cells were replaced, and the car works as normal now. There was a debate about how long-term that fix would be (eg, would the same thing happen soon, as other cells die).
3.25 years later there is no evidence of recurrence/spread and battery diagnostics are all good. That’s an N of 1, but I don’t see any structural reason to think my battery would now be any different than the sibling car’s battery that was next off the production line (assuming there was no additional fault introduced during service).
I'm also willing to bet that this will become a high value item for property theft.
It's still a big heavy item to steal, but it's conceivable to drop it on a skate and hoist it into a van.
After reading your comment I'm thinking that we'll eventually see start seeing YouTube videos crop up of three guys with sawzalls and angle grinders cut out a battery onto a skateboard and hoist it into the back of a truck in minutes.
[1] https://www.edmunds.com/auto-insurance/in-under-two-minutes-...
Lease some land, build a cheap warehouse, stock batteries for profit. Go bankrupt
Put batteries in a ship, dump them in international waters. Go bankrupt.
Sell them abroad as "refurbished" stock. Go bankrupt. This one actually works for expired batteries, you can buy them on ebay.
I think it’s highly likely that batteries will be like printer cartridges and a battery taken from one car won’t just work in another etc.
Let me check with some experts, okay, no they're not.
But what if they burn coal in the electric plant?
Well, we shouldn't do that but still, mildly surprisingly until you think about it, no, still better.
But what about when we run out of rare earths?
They're not rare, so that's not a problem.
I didn't mean run out, I know they're not rare, I meant what about the pollution and the foreigners owning them all?
Did I mention they weren't rare? They don't own them all, they just make them at the moment because we moved a lot of extraction and manufacturing there to take advantage of their low wages and lax labor and environmental laws.
Hah, so you admit that EVs are worse than ICE vehicles!
No, see my first answer.
But if mining stuff is bad and you need to mine stuff for EVs then EVs are bad, and we shouldn't shift to them. QED
Is that seriously your argument?
Okay, never mind that, but what about this warehouse that has hundreds (yeah, not simply dozens but hundreds, with an h!) of batteries in it. Isn't that conclusive proof that climate change was just a hoax by communists to take over the world?
No?
Hah, no-one really believed that, we just really hate regulations so pretended to believe that.
You seem very concerned about pollution and recycling for someone who doesn't like regulation.
No, it's okay we're lying about that too.
As I see it, the batteries will end in landfills, best case. If you can pay for it, they will end in landfills abroad. Nobody who is relevant is serious about this problem because those batteries are still working.
Consumers are sold the idea that the situation will improve in the future. Hopefully, I have to add.
So much for climate change.
And the situation is already pretty good considering there are no piles of lithium batteries being dumped left right and center. Just not a thing because they are way too valuable for that.
You say landfill, I say lithium mine with extremely rich deposits of lithium. Much richer than most natural deposits of the stuff. People are investing in companies that are extracting it from brines that have no more than a few hundred parts per million. It's that valuable. A battery that has kilos of the stuff is worth the kilo price (about 25-29$) minus the price of extraction. A typical Tesla would have around 60-70 kilos of the stuff; close to 2000$ if you can extract it. The lithium in a completely spent EV battery is worth more than many second hand ICE cars that are still driving around. And that's just accounting for the lithium. There is also copper, nickel, cobalt (at least for now) and a few other nice things in there that are each pretty lucrative to attempt to recycle.
Good old lead acid batteries are recycled as well for the same reason. They are still worth a few dollars because of the raw materials. ICE cars are routinely stripped for anything remotely valuable that can be reused or recycled before the rest of it is melted down so the metal can be recycled.
Anyway, consumers don't need to be sold on anything. They've been fine burning obscene amounts of petrol coming from places they couldn't care less about, mined under nature destroying circumstances they never cared about either. All while not caring about the lethal effects of the pollution they are causing in the environment where they and their loved ones actually live and while not feeling the slightest amount of guilt buying SUV type ICE vehicles guzzling many times the amount of fuel they would actually need to do their shopping and school runs. There is more than a bit of double standards being applied here. Hypocrisy would be a better word for it.
Why would you throw that away? Those are valuable and expensive resources.
The question is entirely around if you can go further and recycle more of the inners and if you can do this without smelting down the whole battery.
I'm completely convinced these batteries won't end up in landfills. I'm less convinced that we won't get there without burning a bunch of silicon and lithium.
Bias Disclaimer: I'm working at a company (founder) where we build robots to automatically disassemble the batteries and avoid logistics costs.
Making more cars was never going to solve climate change, EVs still have lifetime co2 footprints of the same magnitude as gas cars plus their use is not capped by available supply of oil.