What Redwood learned in its first year of EV battery recycling | Hacker News Reader

What Redwood learned in its first year of EV battery recycling

arstechnica.com

41 pointsrbanffy24 comments

Redwood has been getting a lot of press lately over their potential $2 billion dollar loan (https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2023/02/09/redwood-...), but what shocks me with this is how low volume their process is now. I talk a lot about scale and volume in recycling - but 250NT of material is nothing. Some large car shredders generate that much in fluff/ADC in a day, and there are dozens of them operating around the country.

We recycle about 12 million cars a year in the US - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_recycling - this is 1,268 cars worth of batteries. We have a long way to go!

I think this says a lot about how exaggerated the discussion around EV battery failure rates is.

Older Nissan Leafs are still on the road: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/09/21/surprise-nissan-leaf-ba...

Nissan’s CEO said the batteries are outliving the cars. Old battery packs are usually repurposed as stationary storage versus being shredded and recycled.

Redwood spinning up when the need is low is better than waiting until the need to dispose of packs and for manufacturing feedstock is high.

When they talk about Damage Defective Return being under 5% - that is major failures. When it’s not DDR - it’s in the same form it was from the OEM

I think this part is the most interesting to me, "Redwood says that the main cost driver in the whole process comes down to logistics, particularly now while there are so few end-of-life EVs waiting to have their battery packs recycled. Redwood says that "in time, as end-of-life pack volumes increase, the logistics cost will decrease so that batteries will become assets that will help make EVs more sustainable and affordable in the long run"

I wonder if we'll see a push for smaller recycling facilities (and the tech that enables them) that are pretty localized to try to minimize transportation costs in the future rather than these massive recycling plants.

If we can get the facilities small enough, they can be co-located with the static storage Grid battery facilities that are hopefully the first re-use of these EV batteries.

>If we can get the facilities small enough, they can be co-located with the static storage Grid battery facilities that are hopefully the first re-use of these EV batteries.

End of life cells will never be directly reused in any form of safety critical application like that. It's simply too dangerous to deal with the voltage and discharge irregularities that come after so many cycles. They will have to be remanufactured from raw materials.

Isn't there a large gap between "no longer cost-effective for mobile applications" and "end of life"?

>Isn't there a large gap between "no longer cost-effective for mobile applications" and "end of life"?

Not for lithium batteries. They have a significant change in voltage (internal resistance) and charge/discharge curve that is unique to each individual cell, based on the specifics of it's lifetime usage. That makes any form of safety critical application impossible. You cannot build a pack around cells with unknown or variable properties. Sure they could be used for hobby projects or DIY stuff, but that's about it.

there's no way to sample the behavior then build an algorithm around it?

B2U storage solutions is doing this today: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/the-big-reuse-25-mwh...

25MWh is pilot-project size, but they are working through the difficulties and building the tooling to enable re-use.

This was operating at a tiny scale.

My guess is we’ll have 10 or so around the country each dealing with 100x as many batteries.

The trick will be doing the front end of the process more local to material (size reduction and separation) and then doing refining at larger plants. They will shred the batteries, pull out plastics and metals, and concentrate the black mass. This is the good stuff, and you will reduce the mass and dimensions considerably.

Yes and:

The state of the lithium-ion battery recycling market - A conversation with battery analyst Yayoi Sekine of BNEF. [DEC 9, 2022]

https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-state-of-the-lithium-ion-battery

An material efficient and cost effective battery recycling industry would be key if we want a somehow durable way of keeping private vehicles.

It's hard to believe we could provide 1 ton batteries to 5B+ people long-term without efficient recycling. The mineral reserves are just not enough.

I fail to see why we should to adopt the constraint that every single human being needs tons of machinery for their sole use just in order to survive.

5B is probably too high an estimate, but there are somewhere around 1.4B cars on the road today. And around 288 million in the US alone.

I'm not saying everyone on the planet should own a car, but I certainly wouldn't bet on this market shrinking any time soon.

Sure if you have $50k for a car, can charge at home, and want to drive 300 miles without charging then you need 1 ton (or so) of batteries.

But as electrification improves, more charging stations, better autonomous driving, car sharing services that don't require drivers, etc. The size of batteries can shrink and the number of people that need dedicated cars will decrease.

A self driving EV could be significantly cheaper than human driven Uber/Lyft, allowing more people to opt in only as needed, which makes public transit more feasible.

Tesla just had a whole thing yesterday arguing that not only are there more than enough minerals, it would require less mining to be in a sustainable energy economy than it does now. https://electrek.co/2023/03/01/tesla-does-the-math-transitio...

What I would like know, and the article does not mention, is how environment friendly is the process. Can they have a profit without generating a lot of pollution?

From the little I known about computer hardware recycling some process generated a lot of hazardous chemicals so I'm concerned if the same happens with EV battery recycling.

The question should focus on: is it cleaner to re-refine during recycling than to do new mining of new materials? (And if it isn't yet—like due to economies of scale—is there a clear road with the concept.)

Mining virgin materials uses much more resources than recycling. The material is already concentrated in the to be recycled items. Strong environmental controls must be in place with the recycling companies, but the impacts are less. Plus you have to think of the regulatory environment where the items are being processed. A domestic to US recycler, with threat of RCRA (Superfund) has incentives to make sure they are following best practices.

> Mining virgin materials uses much more resources than recycling.

That depends heavily on the material in question. Aluminum, yes. Plastic, no.

The value here isn’t decided by the plastics. We are talking lithium, cobalt, copper as primary recovery. There are tons of interesting angles in plastic recycling. Engineered plastics do have value, other polymers not as much

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