Mercedes-Benz battery recycling plant recovers '96%' of materials | Hacker News Reader

Mercedes-Benz battery recycling plant recovers '96%' of materials

electrek.co

33 pointspeutetre18 comments

Battery tech is advancing so quickly that when you recycle a battery at end of life you can get greater than 100% of the original battery's capacity from the same materials, more than offsetting losses due to the recycling process.

Wow that’s an interesting claim! I believe you, but do you have a link where I can read more?

https://rmi.org/insight/the-battery-mineral-loop

I originally learned about it from the interview with a battery recycling expert mentioned here:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mliebreich_as-i-have-been-poi...

I know what youre /trying/ to say. But you seem to be conflating energy storage with energy usage.

How so? At no point did the person you replied to mention energy usage in any form.

"more than offsetting losses due to the recycling process"

if you recycle a 50kwh battery into a 100kwh battery, you aren't going to offset any of the energy used in actually recycling that battery (unless we're assuming that theres another efficiency, lighter weight? that offsets the losses)

I read that as mass losses in recycling inefficiencies rather than energy used for the process.

Ah ok, that would (also) make sense.

I read "greater than 100% of the original battery's capacity from the same materials" and put the emphasis on 'capacity'.

English is hard.

"The new Mercedes-Benz battery recycling plant has an annual capacity of 2,500 tonnes. The recovered materials feed into the production of more than 50,000 battery modules for new all-electric Mercedes-Benz models. So it’s a modest start, but Mercedes plans to scale up production volumes and expand recycling capacities."

A modest start? If that corresponds to 50k new battery modules then wouldn't that also be approximately the same number of five- or ten-year old modules? That should be a sizable share of what Mercedes-Benz sold at the time.

I don’t read that as “recycling currently completely supplies raw materials for 50K units” but rather “this line provides some raw materials which are combined with new materials in a factory that can make 50K units [per year]”

Agree. I don't expect this year's battery to require the same materials in the same proportions as five years ago though, so I don't see that as weasel wording, just as a way of quantifying the amounts they have in common.

A car needs a battery pack, which consist of modules, which in turns consists of cells.

That one has five modules per pack: https://www.batterydesign.net/2021-mercedes-eqa-250/

That one has twelve modules per pack: https://www.batterydesign.net/mercedes-eqs/

So, we talk about maybe an order of magnitude lower battery packs (5k-10k).

They sold like 46k electric cars in Q2 of 2024.

I think, the point of saying it is a modest start is more judged against the total number of cars sold in total (in Q2: 496,700).

Yes, well, but on that basis it can hardly be more than modest, considering how few old batteries are available to be recycled. Which drains the meaning from the word.

Wow, they are getting down into the innards of the batteries. I was not expecting MB to specialize further than integrating individual 18650 or similar type cells into a battery pack.

This may be a dumb question: What is a battery module? Is it a single cell of which hundreds get combined for a single car battery, or is it a group of cells of which less than a dozen get put together for a car battery? Or is it 1 module per car? If it's 1 module per car are they just saying "this recycling will go into all the new cells we make this year"?

I would say a module is the entire battery system, or at minimum a standardised self contained unit with battery balancing/cooling built in.

So I would say between 1 and 5 modules in a car, depending on context.

Different cars have different strategies.

Here's a random eBay buy-it-now, for a 24V 250Ah 5.2kWh cell out of a a Tesla S 85, https://www.ebay.com/itm/115749249082 , $340.

Google is telling me conflicting data on the S, saying twice the capacity. But also nicely explains the cell configuration:

> The 5.3 kWh battery module in the Model S and Model X vehicles is made up of 444 Panasonic NCR18650B cells in a 74p6s

Then a number of these 5kWh modules are combined in the car.

But like, I have a LTO battery from a Honda plug in hybrid that uses much much bigger rectangular cells than the 18650 cylinders and is just like 12s1p or some such. I forget the figure exactly but capacity is much less than 5kWh.

..."Mercedes says its hydrometallurgical process is less intensive in terms of energy consumption and material waste.""... so how much (clean) water does it consume e.g. per car-battery reprocessed?

Not to take away from this being good news, but clean water is also a scarce resource.

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