The biggest EV battery recycling plant in the US is open for business
canarymedia.com
canarymedia.com
Many aspiring refiners brand themselves as recyclers, since turning metals and old batteries into battery-grade powder is more similar than one would expect. (Lithium carbonate.)
Which part?
In summary, they all start with pulverized stuff from which lithium carbonate is extracted and turned into lithium hydroxide. The fact that it's batteries versus rock just changes the front end; nothing downstream could care less.
[1] https://catalysts.basf.com/blog/lets-talk-recycling-what-is-...
[2] https://samcotech.com/what-is-lithium-extraction-and-how-doe...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_hydroxide
[4] https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/metals/battery-metals/lithi...
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation
Often people that care about recycling aren't in it for the money and those that are don't care about actually recycling something.
That's not a problem from the pov of people putting them in the bins. Their concern was that batteries make it to a recycler, not that money is saved.
Overall, I feel like people think way too much about money, money changing hands is often worthless as an indicator of actual impact.
Haven't seen many more advanced machines here, but those go back to the same problem - it takes more time than dumping it into an open bin "on your way". This leads to people not recycling it.
There's also the fact that a lot of countries don't actually have the capabilities to recycle even if they collect it. Yes real capacity. It's been uncovered many times where recycling just takes a roundabout tour back to the dumps. There's also a huge amount of fraud in this area. Companies take the money and send to China or other places.
The theory of recycling is good but more needs to be done to actually get it going.
Batteries on the other hand... they're worth more so just maybe... but there have been lots of electronics recycling fraud just as well...
Flume 18350 550mah new, $1.80
Elfbar 16350 650mAh new, $2.66
16350: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256802959295031.html
I have no idea how to sell them locally, or who I'd even sell them to though.
I guess this makes sense at scale. I’m not sure what I was picturing.
Recycling of metals and glass succeedd because you can just grind and melt everything.
But how they sort it afterwards? I have no idea. Not all metal is conductive, though I have to assume they do some magnetized sorting. Plastic can probably be blown away for sorting further down the line.
Might need to explore this more in the near future!
It's simpler and cheaper to machine sort the stuff at one location than have lots of little bins into which people mis-sort stuff. Most of the cost is out collecting the stuff, not sorting it, and single-stream recycling simplifies the collecting.
My city has one and there are several others serving smaller areas, recycling is commingled and mixed materials are accepted.
not worth it to clean yourself.
Individual cells are shredded, the cover metal is removed by magnets, anything soluble is removed by water or other solvents, whatever remains possibly may be further processed, or can go safely to a landfill.
jkjk. Thanks for sharing!
Note that ore is more complex as you need to remove a lot more non-battery stuff, while in a used battery what you want is still in fairly high concentration, just not in the form a battery needs.
Is is that it freely ejects electrons at a higher rate than other materials, given a certain catalyst?
Then there’s other factors like discharge recharge, temperatures, all that, but lithium is basically the best if you can get the other factors to play nice too:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Tables/electpot.h...
https://www.metal.com/price/New%20Energy/Used-Lithium-ion-Ba...
About 95% of Lithium can be reused.
Current thinking for electric vehicle fires is to let them burn out unless there's a threat to something nearby. If there is, 8 hours of spraying water on the vehicle usually works. But then the mess may re-ignite.
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Qxo7u9Z5cI1tNC5BzFwt9QOik78...
For those interested, it's shitty imported cheap products, and/or (and I believe this is more common) cheap shitty third party chargers that overload the BMS/don't shut off correctly when they are supposed to.
Buy reputable brands (lots and lots of the scooters and e-bikes you see are just re-branded stuff from the same Chinese OEM) and don't get a third party charger, stick to first-party ones.
I’ve damaged a number of lipo cell pouches (my hobby uses a lot of them) and water does make them burn more aggressively in the short term. It’ll go from smoldering to shooting a foot of fire with a splash of water.
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2014/ra/c3ra4574...
This oxygen feeds the fire and make it hard to fight.
Lithium iron phosphate do not show this kind of reaction.
Similar to Hydrogen and Sodium, elements in the first column of the periodic table are highly reactive (flammable) because they readily give away their single electron in the outermost orbital.
Some Lithium battery variants might have marginally safer properties, but they are fundamentally volatile at full charge.
Primary (disposable) lithium batteries do contain metallic lithium in the charged state, and there are efforts to develop rechargeable batteries using pure lithium metal at the anode. Rechargeable batteries that contain metallic lithium anodes would be able to store more energy, but they are also more hazardous and currently have low cycle life.
Investing in recycling means competing directly with the mines which are highly consolidated and incredibly powerful. They do not care about recycling by the nature and culture of their businesses. It’s a fool’s errand and I’ve seen so many investors loose their entire investment over and over again.
If you like loosing money, by all means, invest in recycling. At the end of the day these recycling businesses are undesirable —- they are capital intensive, high risk, low yield with a weak consumer market. They are most definitely not carbon neutral in their end to end operations. They don’t even typically provide good paying jobs for the communities they serve because the unit economics are so poor. The only 10+ year surviving companies exist almost entirely on government subsidies and aren’t real businesses. Communities don’t want them either so that’s why they are always in the middle of nowhere.
All the private activities are all the same — typically some VC or rich investor will pair up with a charismatic founders and try to do it because hey environment I feel good doing good. But then just wait a few years when they get tired of shoveling money in by the truckload.
The joke goes for every $1 of material recycled, $10 of cash is burned.
If it’s cheaper to mine, then mine. I won’t weep for the cobalt and lithium piles.
This is better read as “and never will be in the current economic climate”. It’s not like the used batteries are launched into space.
Sure, processing used material is expensive, but all that's mined has to be disposed of, and if it's not expensive, it's most likely fuelling criminal organizations.
The main input for plastics is currently fossil fuels so there's a lot of misinformation about it, as there is for anything else that would harm fossil fuel sales.
Ironically, they seem to have just given more momentum to the push to ban single use plastics and reduce its use generally.
Propagandists that used to say recycling plastic didn't work are now promoting it to fend off outright bans. The only thing that remains consistent in their approach is "what benefits fossil fuel interests?".
> The scrap and used batteries go through mechanical shredding and sieving, which produces “black mass.” Ascend extracts lithium carbonate from the mass; the remaining mass contains materials such as graphite, nickel, cobalt and manganese.
The article brags about the input, but is cagey on the details of the about. Of the 30k tons processed in a year, what percentage is reconstituted?
LI ion batteries are composed mostly of Nickel and Steel. Both of which are highly recyclable. The fact that they are also able to pull out the lithium is really pretty impressive.
The structure of a LI ion battery is essentially a steel case with a metal foil (iron or nickel) coated with a lithium/cobalt/silicon/carbon/phosphorous powder.
[0] – https://opendata.atlantaregional.com/datasets/GARC::railroad...
Here's a document that contains a map of current rail density: https://www.dot.ga.gov/InvestSmart/Freight/GeorgiaFreight/Ta...
https://openrailwaymap.org/ shows (if you zoom in far enough) that at least some lines around Atlanta are only single track. https://www.trains.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/multi-trac... suggests most of them are.
It isn't a common issue in Russia or China (similar rail freight use to the USA). Double tracks means no waiting for opposing trains, and it's then straightforward to fit passenger trains, which stop at stations but go faster, between constant speed freight trains.
It does mean twice as much track must be maintained to a higher standard than freight-only track.
Rail passengers displaced by freight become low occupancy vehicle trips.
In my state, a commuter rail coach car has about 180 seats. Let's be cautious and assume 50% occupancy.
That's 90 people, and based off the US passenger car fleet averaging 25mpg, they collectively would have used 3.6 gallons of gas per mile.
An eighteen wheeler gets 5-10 miles per gallon.
Even assuming just 5mpg, the passengers in that one coach car would have used eighteen times more fuel than the truck hauling a container would.
Furthermore: freight and passenger use of rail are not mutually exclusive uses. Freight is in theory far less sensitive to scheduling, and like a lot of trucked freight, can happen during times passenger use is low. But because industry has squeezed their supply chains to the hair of breaking under "just in time delivery" to minimize warehouse space and the like...which bit us pretty severely in the pandemic...freight companies are optimizing for shareholder profits and own the tracks. So they prioritize their freight over passengers. Result? Passenger service is riddled with service issues, leading to less passenger use, which is fine as far as the freight companies are concerned, because they can move more freight.
The core problem is that critical infrastructure is being run privately by for-profit publicly traded companies.
Passenger rail doesn't tend to break even on long-distance dedicated routes, even taking into account externalities.
Rail also has cost, including externalities. For example, as a wise person on the Internet once said, "Trains take you from a place you don't live to a place you're not going to." The "last-mile problem" is a non-trivial factor to building train networks which by definition is not solvable by more rail.
You're considering a cost analysis. A more complete analysis is the benefit-cost analysis (BCA). If the benefits outweigh the costs, the project is a net positive for society. Asking only how much our freeways cost us avoids consideration of the known benefits. Here's a BCA from 2021 which investigates a highway project, so you can see exactly how much freeways benefit and cost us: https://www.mdot.maryland.gov/OPCP/I-81BCA_Report.pdf
>It doesn't have to.
That's a nice sentiment, but sometimes the energy required to reform is higher than expected losses. The entire Amtrak network is kept afloat because of a handful of lines in New England between DC, New York, and Boston. Amtrak basically runs a loss everywhere else.
The trivial answer is to build out last-mile services: trams, buses, actually usable bike lanes, and something that could perfectly well work in US suburbia hell (wide, but barely frequented streets): automated "people movers".
Changing the primary transportation mode of a population requires a cultural shift to adopt the new mode. The population must be willing to forgo what they already have in favor of something new. You are saying that automated "people movers" (which is an emotional sketch rather than an defined policy item) will work well in car-ubiquitous US suburbia, but these folks live in suburbia specifically because of low population density and general quality-of-life. They explicitly enjoy being around people they know and not being around people they don't know. Any solution you're proposing must respect their existing values while providing an alternative option.
Your examples of last-mile services aren't really last-mile services, save for the final one:
>trams
Since it seems infeasible to allow anyone to board a tram at any point on its journey, tram stops will be necessary. Perhaps you now face a last-quarter-mile problem, which is better but still may not be good enough for that specific population. Track maintenance may be significantly lessened by using a "trackless tram", but such would have severe challenges in a snowy climate. Trams only work in dense urban environments.
>buses
Buses have been used in cities for many decades, so our understanding of them is that they work generally well. Buses are common in suburban environments with many low-income residents. The benefit of buses is their limited amount of supporting infrastructure and route adaptability. However, similar to the tram situation, a bus still does not get you directly to your home.
>actually usable bike lanes
Bike lanes in dense urban environments are almost always a net positive. What constitutes an "actually usable" bike lane depends on an individual's risk tolerance. As a last-mile problem, not all people are physically able to bike from a train station, though ebikes do help. Again, weather can impact people being willing to bike, let alone leave the house.
>automated "people movers"
This service is more conceptual, but I imagine you're thinking of a Waymo-style service, where you can summon an autonomous vehicle which will pick you up at home and take you to-and-from the station. The main issues here are availability and reliability. If addressed, you'll likely crack the suburban transportation nut, but such individualized transportation in cities isn't sustainable.
I"m not sure what point you are making here. The UK, Germany, and Japan have very good rail networks and were democratically governed the last time I looked.
We had an entire public transit system that included the "last mile." It was systematically destroyed by the automotive industry.
The reset of the developed world has much better public transit. Terrible public transit isn't quite a uniquely American problem, but it's close.
Do go on about how it's "absolutely not trivial in the slightest", though.
> As a last-mile problem, not all people are physically able to bike from a train station, though ebikes do help
Biking takes less energy and fitness than walking does, even at a faster speed. Before you argue with me, google it, please. Before you start whinging about the elderly: the people old enough to not be able to bike are about 10% or less of the population, and since bike lanes are not the only option, "the elderly can't do it" isn't even a valid counterpoint anyway.
It's not trivial because, as you note, past efforts WERE systematically destroyed by the automotive industry. Getting better public infrastructure is an advocacy problem, and the political environment needs to be supportive of such efforts.
Also, you may be referencing the streetcars systems used by many cities about 100 years ago, which were destroyed by the auto industry in favor of their buses. Now that electric buses exist, I would much rather live in a city with a fleet of electric buses than electric streetcars. Some US cities are even implementing the point-to-point-charging supercapacitor buses, which is even more sustainable.
>Biking takes less energy and fitness than walking does, even at a faster speed.
No argument there. I bike multiple times a week in a large US city, even during rush hour and traffic jams. More people should bike, especially because of the health benefits, and most US cities will benefit from better bike infrastructure. We can look to Amsterdam and other European places for good examples of bike transportation and storage infrastructure.
That said, biking in Amsterdam is very different than biking in much of the US. The Wikipedia article on Amsterdam says the average high over a year ranges between 43F - 72F. What an ideal climate for biking; no wonder so many people there bike. I've biked in traffic in snowstorms in one of the most bike-friendly cities in the US, and I was usually the only person out there. People just don't like to bike in the cold and extreme heat. People just don't like to be out in the cold and extreme heat in general, which is why personal vehicles are so appealing in those places.
Nah, this just makes it obvious you never commuted using public transit tbh. Trams feel much more stable, have more room, and their routes are easier to reason about. Trams always end up more desirable than buses, which sway, feel crowded, and rattle due to uneven road surface.
I'm German. Europeans in general have tons of experience with running public transport in constrained-budget scenarios. Just ask us if you need help.
> and assuming they are demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of how change gets made in a democratic, even republican, manner.
If democracy doesn't implement change on its own, rising prices of gasoline, changing attitudes of Gen X and demographic requirements (SAHMs with nothing to do but drive children around on errands won't be around for much longer given that these women will be part of the working class by necessity) will.
Those still thinking that they can keep on living like they did since the 50s are deluding themselves and their peers. Democracy can't override market forces or nature.
> However, similar to the tram situation, a bus still does not get you directly to your home.
You can make bus stops dense enough to achieve walking distances < 200m. Unlike trams, buses can stop very fast which makes dynamic stops (i.e. the bus only stops when people want to enter/exit) possible and most bus lines already operate that way.
> As a last-mile problem, not all people are physically able to bike from a train station, though ebikes do help.
You're constantly bringing up the "not everyone can use it" point, which is valid on its own but no one, even the most radical Greens, calls for banning people with disabilities from having a car as transportation. The goal is to get the remaining 99% of local/regional individual-transportation traffic to use shared services.
> This service is more conceptual, but I imagine you're thinking of a Waymo-style service, where you can summon an autonomous vehicle which will pick you up at home and take you to-and-from the station. The main issues here are availability and reliability. If addressed, you'll likely crack the suburban transportation nut, but such individualized transportation in cities isn't sustainable.
I rather thought of electric "micro buses", think like the size of a VW T4 van, that autonomously drive in a 5-minute schedule through the suburbs and people just can hop on and off wherever they want. Basically, just as flexible as a car, but usable by everyone. Your idea is also great, but I'd not say that it isn't sustainable in cities - to the contrary, especially cities will be going towards that route. Already, London drastically restricts driving into the city, a number of city cores in Germany are no-car, Barcelona plans to have 60% of it's streets car-free.
I'm sure some of us will. That said, Europe is only directly comparable to the Northeast in terms of geography, climate, and population density. The US is truly massive, and each part of the country has distinct cultural norms which may or may not support public transit development.
According to this page (https://nytransit.org/resources/public-transit-facts), ~60% of people on public transit are commuters. Here's a 2021 study from our Census Bureau on commuters using public transit in the US (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/public-t...). The key points:
>About 5% of all U.S. workers in 2019 commuted by public transportation.
>Commuters use buses (46.3% of all public transportation commuters, or about 3.6 million people); subway or elevated rail (37.7%), long-distance train or commuter rail (11.8%); light rail, streetcar or trolley (3.1%); and ferryboat (1.0%).
>Roughly 3 million of the nation’s 7.8 million public transportation commuters lived in the New York metro area.
>70% of the nation’s public transportation commuters live in one of the seven largest metropolitan areas.
>The percentage of workers who commuted by public transportation varied by region. The Northeast had the highest share of workers who commuted by transit, at 14.3%, followed by the West (4.4%), the Midwest (3.0%), and the South (2.0%).
>The percentage of U.S. workers commuting by public transportation fell from 12.1% in 1960 to around 5.0% in 2019.
The most surprising statistic to me is that NYC accounts for roughly 40% of public transportation commuters in the country. The rest make general sense.
>The goal is to get the remaining 99% of local/regional individual-transportation traffic to use shared services.
Well, that is YOUR goal. The vast majority of Americans do not live in dense urban environments, so most will not support your goal. That's okay; we have our own mixture of geographic, climate, and population density realities which differ from your own. (Actually, you would be better served talking about measures in different states rather than the US as a whole, because we're built state-first, not federal-first like all European countries save for Switzerland.)
You might find it interesting that, in some parts of US suburbia, individuals and families roam around towns riding electric golf carts instead of cars using separate roadway infrastructure.
As an American who (1) generally supports mass transit and non-personal-car modes of transportation while (2) understanding the globally-unique geographic, climate, population density, and cultural realities of the US, here's how I envision mass transit will look in a few decades across the US:
>Planes: widely used everywhere, airports are linked to urban centers by rail or BRT
>Trains: same cross-country lines exist, Northeast network continues strong, train networks in Florida and on the Pacific Coast expand, lightly used for regular transit in 80% of states
>Light-rail/subway: most major US cities have one, existing networks see varying degrees of expansion, ridership increases handled by more frequent trains
>Trams: used in dense urban cores of major US cities which do not have extensive light-rail/subway network, sees strong ridership, trackless more prevalent than track
>Streetcars: limited use, electric trams or buses more preferred due to track and electrification infrastructure and maintenance costs
>BRT: widely deployed across major urban areas, used to either extend light-rail/subway reach or provide hub-to-destination travel
>Buses: still widely used, expanded service in both urban and suburban areas, direct home-to-station travel facilitated by autonomous microbuses
>Bike infrastructure: widely deployed across all major urban areas and most suburban areas, virtually all old railroads converted to bikeways, some new bikeway construction for commuters, protected bike lanes in all dense urban cores
>Cars: still used each and every day by the majority of Americans, many are electric, some are autonomous
Airplanes have the exact same problem, but I don't see people saying we should stop investing in airports.
For long distance travel, I don't think it's a huge problem that you might need multiple modes of transit to get all the way from A to B.
A train system can’t do that… in my example you’ll end up either going South along the coast and then west through New Orleans to San Antonio, and then back north to Dallas, or the same but reach Mew Orleans via Chicago.
Trains work well when there is a large central(ish) city that can act as a hub? Like London, Paris, or Berlin. Not so well in the US where the population is heavily biased towards the outer rim, with a relatively a gaunt desert of nothing in the middle.
Fair point. We should then see if air travel holds a key advantage over rail travel in the USA. As I see it, the answer is in both space and time savings, both of which minimize cost and maximize benefit. The time savings are particularly pronounced, especially over distances greater than, say, a few hundred miles. Happy to elaborate on the savings in more detail, if you desire such.
>For long distance travel, I don't think it's a huge problem that you might need multiple modes of transit to get all the way from A to B.
That is, of course, your opinion. I'm sure there are tens, if not hundreds, of millions of Americans who will strongly disagree with you because they are, in no particular order: feeble, disabled, terrified of a particular mode of transit, hurried, cost-conscious, traveling with multiple young children, etc.
Amazingly, railroads are not much cheaper. The current costs of tracks are estimated at about $2 million per mile, and this is without taking into account all other necessary rail infrastructure (such as sorting yards, maintenance facilities, etc.).
And CO2 emissions are being fixed by switching from gas cars to EVs.
In any case, as others have pointed out, we don't have to argue hypotheticals here— China, Japan, France, Germany, etc have all shown that frequent-service electrified passenger rail is perfectly possible and an incredible public good.
Not reall, rail is 9 times more energy efficient than road vechicles. Thats why its cheaper to have a diesel locomotove move freight than to pour the same diesel into trucks.
The whole reason rail exists is thsa its the most efficient form of tranportation on land.
Yes trains have some efficiency advantages, but in similar service the difference is small. You only get those advantages when you use trains for things that trucks cannot do at all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/opinion/business-economic...
A number of YouTube video essays argue the sides of this as well, here's one based around Sen. Sanders confronting a rail CEO in the wake of the recent Ohio derailment: https://youtu.be/e4w0q5NzCwA
If you're hauling coal at 35 mph. For people-moving application it's not that more effective: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
Look at "Eurostar", which is a not-even-that-new high speed electric train: 6g/km. Though the calculation probably also takes account of the number of people on the train, and Eurostar will have better utilisation than average.
(NB coal and ore is moved at about 60mph in the UK, to avoid slowing other trains.)
The issue is in the overhead. It's the same for international/domestic flights.
Long-distance trains are more efficient than local trains, because they can be longer (more cars) and don't have to slow down/accelerate all the time.
According to this book (which provides assumptions and calculations supporting) [0], 10:1 in favor of rail, as a conservative estimate.
https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Industrial_and_System....
The author is smoking some hard crack.
(Other than night trains, I'd expect these to be the longest in Europe.)
It's way too long for commuting. There will be no way to build platforms for it unless you're doing a full green-field build.
Trains tend to maintain longer distances, but if you want to ignore safety we can follow a lot closer.
A realistic scenario for commuter trains (that would replace a freeway) is 1 train every 10 minutes, and even this is pretty tough. So you have 6 trains per hour, and to match the throughput you'd need 1425 people per train.
Most train platforms are maxed out at well below 10 cars (Caltrain is 6 cars), 20 car trains are just pure nonsense for commuting. So for 10 car trains it'll be around 150 people per car. Caltrain cars are 130 seats per car ( https://www.greencaltrain.com/2014/05/keeping-up-with-caltra... ), with another 40 standing places.
Basically, a perfectly run commuter train system is _just_ barely comparable with a regular 6-lane freeway.
Sorry train fans, but trains are not that great for commuting.
Also look at any major route in Britain, like Manchester to London, no 6-lane highways anywhere in sight.
You are comparing some weak-ass train with a giant highway. It's easy to extend a rail platform to accomodate more train cars - you just need to knock down a few buildings in a local area. Now try widening a 3-lane highway into a 6-lane, that could be hundreds of building and NYMBY's across three cities.
Do you know any actual transit systems that run 20-car trains?
"Inter-Capital" sets consisting of two power cars and eighteen passenger carriages. These trains are 394 metres (1,293 ft) long and can carry 750 passengers: 206 in first class, 544 in standard class
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurostar#:~:text=These%20train....
I can't find info on the upcoming HS2. However I do testify that extremely long trains are common in Eastern Europe, Russia, India, etc. they might not be high-speed but they do move a lot of people at once.
Quick comparison: more people (3.6m) go through Shinjuku Station in Tokyo than the daytime population of Manhattan, at 3.1m. Only half of those travel into Manhattan, using all modes of transport. When things get extreme it’s hard to just double the road network and parking into a single location.
This means that one track would need to carry a bit more than 150000 people a day on average. A 6-lane freeway can carry around 100000 people a day.
As a sanity check, the infamous Katy Freeway carries 350000 cars a day, for about 600000 people. It's 14 main travel lanes wide.
So yep, trains are not that efficient compared to freeways.
Oh, and that's not the entirety of the Tokyo metro population, which is ~37m. The entire of Texas is ~29m-ish and that's spread out so far and wide they can afford to fuck around with 14 lane highways. The scale and solution are incomparable.
[1] https://wbcapp.oaklandnet.com/cs/groups/public/documents/pro...
Depending on density. I'd wager the Atlanta metropolitan area is just about crossing that threshold, i.e. they should built it now.
2,000,000 daily vehicles on this Atlanta transit system
The city of Atlanta takes its name from the Atlantic railroad!
US increases EV battery recycling capacity with new AL facility processing up to 10K tonnes annually https://electrek.co/2022/10/14/us-increases-ev-battery-recyc...
Redwood Materials recovers ~95% of metals from EOL battery packs https://www.teslarati.com/redwood-materials-metal-recovery-e...
https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/us-geologica...
[0] - A good example would be 18650 batteries; these are used by Tesla but are found in lots of other things.
In other words, it’s not just lithium in those batteries. Got to process it, make sure it’s discharged properly, remove non-recyclable materials, then you can start the recycling of the raw materials.
Whether this process is more cost prohibitive vs using new materials is what I want to know.
As we all know, the O&G industry introduced a petroleum byproduct known as plastic and flooded the market with it. Big promises were made about their “infinite recycle” potential. Not to mention a shit ton of recycling facilities built to process it.
Fast forward to today, plastic trash has invaded our entire food chain, polluted the ground and oceans, ruining water ecosystems. Most of the recycling facilities that were built in the 80s and 90s are defunct with responsibility pushed to local municipalities to process.
Seems like we are repeating history
Side note about consumer lithium batteries: The nearest lithium recycling near me is 40 miles away, and it costs $$ to drop of your stuff. I can afford that, but I doubt most Americans properly dispose of their batteries. Heck, I have a neighbor who burns his trash near the road and one time saw him burning a few car batteries in the pile.
This is the biggest limit for re-using and recycling EV batteries, the damn things just won't die.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/electric-car-battery-models-...
> "That’s not to say there are enough old batteries coming in to fill the factory. Currently, 80 to 90 percent of what’s going into Ascend’s Covington facility is scrap materials from battery factories, including SK Battery America’s plant in Commerce, Georgia."
Eventually we'll have a lot more end-of-life batteries, but for now most of the EV battery packs that have ever been made are still in the middle of their respective bathtub curves.
You are thinking about this wrong. The value of the lithium inside those cars is higher than a lot of second hand ICE cars. There can be tens of kilos of lithium in a typical EV. The price of lithium is about 30-40$/kilo currently. That could come down. But it's way more valuable than iron, lead, aluminium, etc.
I wonder if recycling of ev batteries might be premature for some or many cells?
I've also seen folks on the RV forum using modules (though usually just one, not an entire pack).
$10K is on the low side for most people forking out money for powerwall-size systems. The reason some people use old EV batteries is because they're cheaper than buying a bank of LFPs, even when you buy cells in bulk and assemble the batteries yourself. Before the pandemic caused the world to go crazy, people were buying used Chevy Bolts because it was cheaper to buy the car, park it forever, and tap into the battery system than it was to buy batteries by themselves (and the Bolt has a really simple HV battery setup that's easy for a competent DIYer to work with).
The approach taken is practical, but kind of stupid. We want to physically separate these materials, so let's grind them into a well mixed aqueous slurry, then let the process chemists loose to solve it with science.
Particulate contamination of new or recycled battery materials with iron particles is a particular concern. Grinding the steel battery casings will not help.
The failure isn't with the battery recyclers, we shouldn't blame them. The issue is that consumers pay $0.05 per cell to recycle cells which at the moment are not recyclable, and we all see it as OK. I got my Tesla, ... you. So, as a result, there is zero incentive to consider the full product life cycle when designing cells.
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/09/21/surprise-nissan-leaf-ba...
Not super familiar with Ascend ground truth, but very familiar with Redwood Materials state of the art.
Battery production is still massively wasteful in terms of partially finished or finished products that need to be scrapped. The reason is that battery quality is critical at every level. One tiny piece of iron embedded in one battery out of a million can mean a catastrophic fire and tens of millions in damages. If there is a systemic defect that manifests during cell testing and is caught, the whole production batch should be scrapped. Most of this scrap happens before the batteries are shipped, and you never see it, except in this too-honest article. You see how this plays out in car fires, resulting from battery defects, resulting in large recalls.
Run into defects in semiconductor manufacturing, and scrap cost is lower, and you don't have an obvious and direct link between the defects and catastrophic failure modes.
Keeping iron particles and manufacturing defects out of batteries isn't a "solvable" problem. You try to minimize it and catch it. Without technical breakthroughs and using existing technologies, the higher the batteries' performance, the less the margin for error.
We don't have a good baseline cultural understanding for what lithium-ion batteries are. In general, household batteries, AAs, AAAs, car batteries use a water-based electrolyte. They do not catch fire. Lithium-ion batteries use an organic solvent as electrolyte and when punctured, dropped, or just cycling in everyday use if defective, turn into red-hot self-propelled blowtorches.
I am not sure of your meaning. Because, taken literally, our 2011 Nissan Leaf would like a word with you.
> In fact, many EV batteries may outlast the vehicles they are installed in, then enjoy a second life in a stationary storage application before finally being recycled, according to EVANNEX. “At the end of the vehicle’s life — 15 or 20 years down the road — you take the battery out of the car and it’s still healthy with perhaps 60 or 70% of usable charge,” Thomas said.
> “It’s more sustainable to take the battery pack out of the car after 20 years, recycle the car, and reuse the battery. By far the easiest thing to do is take the complete battery out of the vehicle, put it in a shipping container in a rack, and plug that into a solar farm.”
Can’t speak to a Leaf, but I have fast DC charged my 2018 Model S almost exclusively over the last 100k miles and its pack has degraded only 6%.
That's because replacing the battery in a 2011 Nissan Leaf will likely "total" the car (in that, the replacement cost would be more than the car is worth). It's the boat we're in now. Five, six, eight grand to replace the battery for a car that even dealers are only asking $7K for. Where are the cheap replacement batteries that we were promised when we bought the car? My guess is, "we'd rather place those batteries in $70K cars, so those are the customers you're competing with for battery supply." So that's how we're going to replace the battery: with a new Hyundai IONIQ 5.
In fact, many EV batteries may outlast the vehicles they are installed in, then enjoy a second life in a stationary storage application before finally being recycled, according to EVANNEX.
"May", or may not. We don't know, because despite the chatter, I'm not seeing this secondary car battery use. Probably because no one replaces the batteries, because...it's not worth it.
Can’t speak to a Leaf, but I have fast DC charged my 2018 Model S...
Your Tesla also has the advantage of seven years of battery advancement over our Leaf, which has degraded 25%. And the Leaf battery thermal management is non-existent. OTOH, as my wife and I push up against retirement age, with a liquid-cooled battery pack and the 12 years of learning about battery management, I'm assuming that the battery in the new Ioniq 5 coming this week will outlive us.
But at the same time, it's a counter to Nissan marketing guy trying to mansplain to me about their battery lifecycle. I own one of your batteries, Marketing Guy, and I'm detecting slight hints of marketing bullshit.
Yeah, well, totalling shouldn't work like that. A car with a new battery should be worth several thousand more, and the totalling calculation for replacing the battery should be based on the post-work value, not the pre-work value.
What EVs would be off the table? The Leaf is notably bad in this regard, as you mention, because the battery is passively cooled. However, all the other EVs I'm aware of are actively cooled and should be fine in hot temps.
It's an earnest question—I don't know anything except as a consumer who's shopped around for an EV, and as a resident of a hot climate I'd be interested in knowing what I need to look out for.
2011 was a particularly bad year for the Leaf. And they were not great (battery life-wise) before 2015 ('lizard pack').
The newer ones are faring much better. Sure, this is of no consolation for your Leaf, but I'd keep an eye for a battery pack from a Leaf that's totaled for other reasons (minor accident causing airbag deployment, for example). You can even add a larger battery than the one your model came with.
Luckily Leafs are a minority of all EVs so the point still stands - EV batteries will likely outlive the car.
Often times a Leaf's entire pack can substantially recover capacity by replacing a single problematic cell.
I had one for a while and watched the range drop from 50-40 “miles” (half that really) over less than 10k miles of usage before I sold it.
I suspect stationary storage will never EOL. Even after tens of thousands of recharge cycles, the battery can still store some energy, perhaps just 10% of the design capacity, but thats still worth something so it's still worth running.
The only time it is worth throwing out is if the land is valuable and you need it for another project.
This does depend on there not being much 'parasitic load' - ie. fans and pumps which run 24x7 which cost money to run even when they aren't really needed when the battery capacity and charge/discharge speed is really low.
With SoH decreasing the internal resistance increases and the battery inherently becomes a fire hazard. At some point the energy required for cooling will not be justifiable and the battery will have to be decommissioned.
A battery that normally takes an hour to charge can charge 10x slower and take 10 hours to charge, and still be providing some useful value. (nearly everywhere will have a day/night power price discrepancy, as well as a weekday vs weekend discrepancy, and a hot/cold weather discrepancy - so there are lots of timescales over which money can be made)
The reality is that lifespans of products is so long (eg. 30+ years) that no recycling process wants to be built to fit standard mechanical designs from 30 years ago... and 20 years ago... and 10 years ago... Multiply by the number of different designs from different companies and different countries (even with regulation, it is unlikely we would get one global mechanically recyclable design).
If process chemists can't extract everything, then you plasma-ionize what's left and now you just have plain old elements to deal with.
Plasma ionization, can it be cheap and scalable?
It doesn't need to be awfully cheap - those elements (except iron) are pretty valuable per kg, so they can pay for a pretty expensive process while still being cheaper than getting new stuff out of the ground.
Sure, you can rip apart a building and say "ooh, thats a nice steel beam - we could reuse that for another building, or cut it into sheets to roll flat into something else"... But it is cheaper and easier just to chuck it into a furnace and melt it down and start from scratch.
Battery materials and applications are different. They cannot be cheaply and easily melted down and re-used. The main constituents are all very similar and difficult to separate, and need to be separated extremely well in order to be used in battery applications.
The lithium carbonate extraction is very telling. Lithium is #3 in the periodic table. The remaining elements that we would want to extract occupy every number from #24 through #30. The reason that they are extracting cheap lithium and none of the heavy, expensive elements, is that more process development needs to be done.
In light of the above, creating a facility to grind up batteries does not represent much progress towards the core problem, and is not a particularly large step in the right direction. It would be like making a facility to grind up plastic, without having a process in place to recycle the plastic. It's great, but you need more, much more.
(Fun fact, glass pane manufacturing is often done by floating the molten glass on a bath of molten metal so that the surface tension will make it flat. AFAIK they don't usually use molten steel as the metal though.)
Imagine grinding up a bridge or tunnel and trying melt all the steel out of the concrete.
That sounds expensive.
So high temperature applications which remove strong bonds and create programmable ions can lead to atomic elements?
You seem upset that "reuse" is a different word than "recycle".
Battery recycling may go in a different direction than it's currently heading. We may decide to focus on separating out the most valuable of these elements, or only elements from certain battery chemistries. We may even decide that it's not feasible to chemically separate ground battery materials containing iron, chromium, or other contaminants.
In the short term, re-using lithium-ion cells is not particularly feasible due to issues with cell safety and handling. In my mind, re-use doesn't enter into the conversation. If cells are being decommissioned, they would ideally be at or near the end of their useful lives anyways. For instance, if a vehicle was in a car accident, you would never re-use the cells, due to concerns about acceleration damage.
> Currently, Ascend sells most of these substances to the market;
I took that line to mean they sell the recycled materials. You seem to think they are storing them as a combined goop.
I absolutely do think that "recycled" battery materials are being stored as combined goop or "black mass"! For the following reasons: 1. I'm not aware of a commodity spot price for battery sludge/powder 2. I'm not aware of any cell manufacturer using recycled materials in their cathode materials 3. I'm not aware of any cell manufacturer or recycler processing recycled battery sludge/powder and re-selling cathode materials made from recycled materials 4. I am well aware of the large technical and cost barrier to processing and separating this "black mass": The chemical elements occupy all of the positions from #24-#30 in the periodic table, and existing processes to separate the elements are expensive and resource-intensive.
What I don't have insight into is: who is buying recycled battery material mixtures? If they are available cheaply, we could speculate on them and hold them, assuming that refining processes will grow cheaper over time, and that the value of the recycled material mixtures will increase.
> Our advantage starts with a remarkable innovation: Other processes leach metals out of spent battery materials, but our patented Hydro-to-Cathode direct precursor synthesis process leaches out impurities, keeping the valuable metals in solution and eliminating multiple steps in the recycling flow.
I bet if you can execute better they would love to hire you! ;)
I wish the article went into a little more detail on the extent of technical achievement that was reached in commissioning this facility. Never mind the core process, can only imagine the scale of the fire suppression system, dust and fume management, etc. It really is impressive. They should publish a video tour.
I think that this recycling facility occupies a supply chain niche in a larger system: Dispose of old battery cells and preserve the rest of the materials as concentrated ores. The existing cells cannot be safely warehoused as cells, due to fire risk. The concentrated ores can be stored cheaply and safely and will maintain a stable or increasing indexed commodity value, proportionate to improvements in refining processes.
I just think that getting the cell cores out intact and separate from the steel casings would be a great start for the subsequent materials separation processes. Imagine if the cathode and anode foils could be further separated at the time of cell disassembly, and you would have a few material streams that would be simpler to process downstream: steel casings contaminated with powder and maybe a little aluminum and copper, cathode foils with the bulk of the cathode powders and close to zero iron, anode foils with the bulk of the anode powders and close to zero iron, and mixed powder flakes with close to zero iron.
I guess it's about where you move cost and complexity. I view the whole cell grinding as moving complexity downstream. Yes, it may end up being the right thing to do, but that will depend on future technological developments in metal refining, hydrometallurgical separation, and other techniques.
In the article, lithium is extracted from the recycled cell materials. Relatively cheap lithium can be extracted because it occupies position #3 in the periodic table and has very different chemical properties than most of the other elements. According to the article, the expensive elements, occupying positions #24 through #30 in the periodic table, are left together in the black mass and re-sold.
Separating elements #24 through #30 is not yet easy and economical. The central challenges are: A. The elements are all adjacent to one another in the periodic table B. The finished outputs must be extremely pure in order to be suitable for use in battery materials C. Centuries of advancement in mining, metallurgical and process research and development focuses (mostly) on how to get (mostly) pure elements from ores
That's not to say we won't get there. I just think that opening a cell grinding and breakdown facility isn't a particularly large step in the right direction. I actually think it may be a step in the wrong direction, and that cell processing facilities should perhaps be focusing on complexity at the cell disassembly level, processing individual cells to mechanically separate elements, given that cells enter recycling facilities as attached/assembled but relatively nicely separated casings, cathode and anode foils, and cathode and anode powders.
If there are large subsequent advancements in chemical refining processes for separating elements #24 through #30, my above assessments will be proven wrong.