Startups making lithium-ion battery recycling more profitable and sustainable | Hacker News Reader

Startups making lithium-ion battery recycling more profitable and sustainable

canarymedia.com

93 pointsorangebanana138 comments

Why are startups the leaders in lithium recycling? Haven't we learned after decades that producers of trash should be the ones cleaning it up? Europe made manufacturers responsible for all that extra plastic packaging years ago. When Tesla's battery packs wear out they should be dumped at their feet for recycling. Only by folding the problem back on manufacturers will they have any real incentive to build sustainable and repairable products.

Redwood Materials was founded by a Tesla cofounder. They have contracts with both legacy (Ford, notably) and startup automakers, and presumably, will have a contract with Tesla at some point. Panasonic (who manufactures a portion of cells Tesla consumes) has an agreement to source materials for battery production from Redwood.

If you’re asking why JB left to found Redwood instead of Tesla building this capability this internally, I’d speculate that it was to demonstrate some form of independence to get legacy automakers onboard versus them potentially being unwilling to work with a competitor and intertwining their supply chains with Tesla. Tesla could always buy Redwood, but based on the investment Redwood has been able to obtain, that’s an unnecessary organizational complexity.

Tangentially, Tesla does refurbish and repair entire battery packs for purchase by vehicle owners. It’s still expensive though (I was quoted $19k for a 100kw Model S battery pack if I needed a replacement out of warranty, and that is very close to Tesla’s costs based on some inside math).

(nothing above is material non public information)

Totally agree. Incentives would align nicely if they were forced to take their stuff back. Companies would have good reason to design their products in a way that they are easy to recycle. It's hard to understand why this is still not the standard.

Honestly I think we need to go further. We should mandate that all petrol producers invest in enough carbon capture to remove all the co2 produced by burning the fuel.

If you can’t afford to capture the co2 then you can’t afford to burn the fuel.

> Europe made manufacturers responsible for all that extra plastic packaging years ago.

I'm guessing they just pass this cost to consumers and the EU already has very high taxes on average.

Which is how it should be. In the end consumer is making the purchase decision.

You don't have to force them to do it thenselves, just force them to pay for it. This then creates the market and lets big corporation and startups do their thing and the market sort it out because big corps know how to keep their costs down (unfortunately the cheapest option is usually anti-regulation propaganda).

Government regulation leading to efficient free market outcomes. An apparently absurd idea to many even though it's probably the biggest driver of human progress on record.

Tesla doesn't actually do anything. They pay people to do things like build cars. If they have to deal with old batteries then they will be paying someone to deal with them. Whether that is an internal employee or external company is just semantics.

Redwood Materials is super interesting since the founder JB Straubel was one of the key people at Tesla. There aren't many people on the planet who know more about battery production than him.

Investors think so too. As of last year had raised almost $800 million: https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/28/redwood-materials-raises-7...

Don't forget all the people claiming that Tesla just buys batteries, they don't know anything about them.

There is a real need for this. Just today I was dropping the kids off at school and was diverted because a garbage truck had caught fire and had to dump its payload in the middle of the playground. A flaming pile of hot garbage. The firefighter said it was probably caused by a battery someone left in the dumpster...

I've always wondered about this. It seems like it would be quite common that someone would throw away a Li-ion battery. In garbage trucks that compact garbage (all of them?), it would be easy to damage the battery and cause a fire. On the other hand, there might not be a lot of oxygen in the compressed garbage to sustain the fire.

I think standard procedure for garbage trucks is to dump the load over a long area when this happens. There’s probably thermal detectors in the bin that let them know pretty quick that something is up.

Lithium battery fires are extra dangerous because they produce their own oxygen, so they do not need an external oxygen source, and can even continue burning when completely submerged in water.

Almost every shop in Germany has a box for collecting old batteries. There is even one in the office. I happily throw my old batteries there. It’s so easy and convenient.

US has this too, most hardware stores, and some offices.

Some people are just lazy or don't know.

I don't think it's this way everywhere, but I do worry that many of these store disposal options may not work particularly well. A few weeks ago, I had an argument with an employee at Home Depot. I was looking for the battery disposal area and the employee wanted to see what I wanted to deposit. I had a small CR2032 lithium and was told that they don't do the flat ones. That was news to me and my best guess was that the employee was confused about the kind of battery because many of the small batteries are alkaline, which my city has us dispose in the trash. Anyway, eventually management got involved and I was told to just deposit it because they'll throw it away later. After I deposited the battery, the employee opened the box in order to fish it out and the box was full of trash. At best, people were putting large numbers of AAA, AA, C, and D batteries in grocery bags and just throwing them in. Frankly, I think a good amount of it was just plain garbage. The point is that I think that particular Home Depot just takes most of what is in the battery disposal box and just puts it into the trash. I don't think they bother to identify the kinds of batteries in there and the employees I interacted with could not correctly identify battery type.

I do believe strongly in battery and electronic disposal. However, I'm not convinced that all disposal places are created equal. In my area, I will no longer use the hardware stores.

I just read the EPA recommendation for dealing with old batteries [0]. Shocking quote: "In most communities, alkaline and zinc carbon batteries can be safely put in your household trash."

[0] https://www.epa.gov/recycle/used-household-batteries

Those are the little AAA and similar batteries, which don't spontaneously combust like lithium batteries can.

Funny, my dad used to work in the city garage fixing snowplows and garbage trucks, among other things. They had a few incidents of trucks catching on fire, long before the era of lithium batteries.

Typically in those days it was someone discarding fireplace ashes that weren't dead-cold and thus contained a smoldering ember. It's surprisingly easy to sweep out such an ember from what appears to be a long-dead fire, but you'll discover the heat if you sift through the ashes with your hand, even casually.

I was recently researching what to do with an empty small butane canister (the kind used for portable gas stoves - same size/shape/wall thickness as a can of spraypaint). According to the municipal waste site for my city of just over 1 million, I can't put it out for any sort of collection, and I can't bring it back to the stores that sell them, I can't even take it to the landfill facility itself! The only option is some once-every-few-months single day events held in random far-flung parts of the city. While I'm responsible enough to hang on to it and dispose of it properly, I expect most people just chuck the empty (or almost-empty) canisters in the trash - causing exactly the same kind of fire risk you're talking about.

When I first moved to my rural property here I had built a bit of a 'house' for compositing leaves out of strawbales.

I swept some ashes from my (I thought) long dead fire from a few days earlier in there.

About midnight got a call from a neighbour ("your shed is on fire"). Fire department. Sirens. Two fire trucks. Major embarassment.

Kids somehow slept through the whole thing.

Yup

I lived in a ski resort town for some times, and the fire chief said that THE most common cause of fires was visitors conscientiously sweeping out the fireplace, putting the (seemingly) dead ashes in a bag, and leaving them out on the porch with trash collection — hours later, the building is on fire...

I have two fireplaces in my home, including a fairly expensive insert that can heat the whole main floor. And I kind of enjoy the whole wood burning thing. I live rural, so harvest my own trees, split, stack, etc.

But honestly I've come around to a place where I think wood burning needs to be seen as a bygone era thing and probably quite regulated. I only do a fire a couple times a winter now. It's romantic and all, but it's polluting and of dubious safety.

Yup, same here

> had to dump its payload in the middle of the playground

What a bunch of BS "had to". US worships the automobile, so couldn't just dump it in the street, literally dump flaming garbage where kids play instead.

I am just curious how these companies are going to acquire batteries for the recycling. Please correct me if I am wrong, but Tesla sold around two million cars in total. Majority of them in the last couple or so years. That means, these cars will be ready for recycling in 10 or more years (battery 5 years in a car and further as stationary batteries). Electric cars from other manufacturers have sick waiting times. Maybe it’s all a bit too early? Venture capitalists are not going to wait for decades to make profit.

Battery production scrap / rejects is one additional source of material.

“ But this new cohort of recyclers doesn’t have to wait for electric vehicles to hit critical mass. They’ve got plenty to hone their techniques on with existing consumer electronics waste, plus the scrap from new battery manufacturing. ”

Sounds like they’re starting now because they need time to get things efficient enough for the day when EV recycling starts to be needed en mass?

I’m assuming they’ll be put in fixed applications where weight and max efficiency/charge aren’t critical, unless they’re already damaged. Pumped storage is economically viable at 70-80% efficient at each cycle after a big capital investment.

It won’t be EV battery recycling but just battery recycling.

If they start to run short (unlikely) there are plenty of other applications that use similar/identical cells.

Redwood is recycling 60 tons of battery material a day already. The source is primarily the scrap from making batteries. As battery production is ramping up as fast as raw materials can be acquired all around the world, there will be a continual supply of scrap even before we have to worry about recycling the batteries from cars already on the road.

Ten years ago Tesla was making about 10,000 cars per year. Five years ago, it was about 100,000. This past year, it's around 1,000,000. The right time to be working on scaling up recycling processes is ±now.

There's orders of magnitude more electric scooters and other personal mobility devices compared to electric cars.

There are tons of older hybrids out there that also use very large batteries. Prius has been around for 20+ years, i believe.

If the technology works well (i guess the ones not specifically targetted at Tesla batteries) it should work for any lithium battery -- laptop/etc/Solar array batteries.

Any of them hiring in California?

https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/join

Reply on news.ycombinator.com