Can We Recycle Lithium-Ion Batteries? (bbc.com) 98
There's a problem with the lithium (Li) ion batteries used in electric cars and for energy storage. The BBC reports that the most widely-used methods for battery recycling won't work nearly as well, since Li batteries are "larger, heavier, much more complex and even dangerous if taken apart wrong."
Slashdot reader quonset shared their report: In your average battery recycling plant, battery parts are shredded down into a powder, and then that powder is either melted (pyrometallurgy) or dissolved in acid (hydrometallurgy). But Li batteries are made up of lots of different parts that could explode if they're not disassembled carefully. And even when Li batteries are broken down this way, the products aren't easy to reuse. "The current method of simply shredding everything and trying to purify a complex mixture results in expensive processes with low value products," says Andrew Abbott, a physical chemist at the University of Leicester. As a result, it costs more to recycle them than to mine more lithium to make new ones. Also, since large scale, cheap ways to recycle Li batteries are lagging behind, only about 5% of Li batteries are recycled globally, meaning the majority are simply going to waste....
Fortunately, the article points out that several labs are working on developing more efficient and eco-friendly ways to recycle Li batteries [D]isassembling Li batteries is currently being done predominantly by hand in lab settings, which will need to change if direct recycling is to compete with more traditional recycling methods. "In the future, there will need to be more technology in disassembly," says Abbott. "If a battery is assembled using robots, it is logical that it needs to be disassembled in the same way." Abbott's team at the Faraday Institution in the UK is investigating the robotic disassembly of Li batteries as part of the ReLib Project, which specialises in the recycling and reuse of Li batteries.
The team has also found a way to achieve direct recycling of the anode and cathode using an ultrasonic probe, "like what the dentist uses to clean your teeth," he explains. "It focuses ultrasound on a surface which creates tiny bubbles that implode and blast the coating off the surface." This process avoids having to shred the battery parts, which can make recovering them exceedingly difficult. According to Abbott's team's research, this ultrasonic recycling method can process 100 times more material over the same period than the more traditional hydrometallurgy method. He says it can also be done for less than half the cost of creating a new battery from virgin material...
Another idea: replacing lithium-ion batteries altogether with something more eco-friendly: Jodie Lutkenhaus, a professor of chemical engineering at Texas A&M University, has been working on a battery that is made of organic substances that can degrade on command. "Many batteries today are not recycled because of the associated energy and labour cost," says Lutkenhaus. "Batteries that degrade on command may simplify or lower the barrier to recycling. Eventually, these degradation products could be reconstituted back into a fresh new battery, closing the materials life-cycle loop."
It's a fair argument considering that, even when a Li battery is dismantled and its parts are refurbished, there will still be some parts that can't be saved and become waste. A degradable battery like the one Lutkenhaus' team is working on could be a more sustainable power source.
Slashdot reader quonset shared their report: In your average battery recycling plant, battery parts are shredded down into a powder, and then that powder is either melted (pyrometallurgy) or dissolved in acid (hydrometallurgy). But Li batteries are made up of lots of different parts that could explode if they're not disassembled carefully. And even when Li batteries are broken down this way, the products aren't easy to reuse. "The current method of simply shredding everything and trying to purify a complex mixture results in expensive processes with low value products," says Andrew Abbott, a physical chemist at the University of Leicester. As a result, it costs more to recycle them than to mine more lithium to make new ones. Also, since large scale, cheap ways to recycle Li batteries are lagging behind, only about 5% of Li batteries are recycled globally, meaning the majority are simply going to waste....
Fortunately, the article points out that several labs are working on developing more efficient and eco-friendly ways to recycle Li batteries [D]isassembling Li batteries is currently being done predominantly by hand in lab settings, which will need to change if direct recycling is to compete with more traditional recycling methods. "In the future, there will need to be more technology in disassembly," says Abbott. "If a battery is assembled using robots, it is logical that it needs to be disassembled in the same way." Abbott's team at the Faraday Institution in the UK is investigating the robotic disassembly of Li batteries as part of the ReLib Project, which specialises in the recycling and reuse of Li batteries.
The team has also found a way to achieve direct recycling of the anode and cathode using an ultrasonic probe, "like what the dentist uses to clean your teeth," he explains. "It focuses ultrasound on a surface which creates tiny bubbles that implode and blast the coating off the surface." This process avoids having to shred the battery parts, which can make recovering them exceedingly difficult. According to Abbott's team's research, this ultrasonic recycling method can process 100 times more material over the same period than the more traditional hydrometallurgy method. He says it can also be done for less than half the cost of creating a new battery from virgin material...
Another idea: replacing lithium-ion batteries altogether with something more eco-friendly: Jodie Lutkenhaus, a professor of chemical engineering at Texas A&M University, has been working on a battery that is made of organic substances that can degrade on command. "Many batteries today are not recycled because of the associated energy and labour cost," says Lutkenhaus. "Batteries that degrade on command may simplify or lower the barrier to recycling. Eventually, these degradation products could be reconstituted back into a fresh new battery, closing the materials life-cycle loop."
It's a fair argument considering that, even when a Li battery is dismantled and its parts are refurbished, there will still be some parts that can't be saved and become waste. A degradable battery like the one Lutkenhaus' team is working on could be a more sustainable power source.
wait for availability... (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't recycle stuff that isn't available to recycle.
Re:wait for availability... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's mountains of dead phone batteries just waiting someone to invent a very profitable way to recycle em.
If you get to a point where it's cheaper to buy from you than making a brand new one, you're a very, very rich man.
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Also watch the video from the YouTuber Thoisoi2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:wait for availability... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:wait for availability... (Score:4, Insightful)
There are a few lithium ion battery recyclers out there.
What's holding them back is simply availability - there just aren't enough batteries being thrown away to scale the process up.
You might think all the old laptops and phones generate a whole lot of it, but it doesn't.
And there's a lot of valuable substances worth recycling - from the cobalt and nickel to the material that traps the lithium ions itself (the ions migrate between the electrodes and inculcate. In fact, that material, when recycled, performs better than new.
The problem is, it's going to take a number of years before EV batteries actually need recycling. Even after 10 years, many are still good enough for EV use. And after that, they are often useful in other places like home power storage or grid batteries. And this isn't recycling the cells, this is reusing the cells - taking the cells out of an EV and putting them into use in another application directly. So it might be 20 to 30 years before enough volume of EV batteries are scrapped.
There are already several companies that want to scale up their recycling, but they just don't have enough used batteries to scale.
Heck, even when an EV is written off and scrapped, the battery is often snapped up as it's still valuable - even damaged people extract and use the cells for other purposes, or rebuilding EV batteries.
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Have you ever seen a car shredder? (Score:2)
The problem is, it's going to take a number of years before EV batteries actually need recycling. Even after 10 years, many are still good enough for EV use. And after that, they are often useful in other places like home power storage or grid batteries. And this isn't recycling the cells, this is reusing the cells - taking the cells out of an EV and putting them into use in another application directly. So it might be 20 to 30 years before enough volume of EV batteries are scrapped.
There are already several companies that want to scale up their recycling, but they just don't have enough used batteries to scale.
Heck, even when an EV is written off and scrapped, the battery is often snapped up as it's still valuable - even damaged people extract and use the cells for other purposes, or rebuilding EV batteries.
So yeah, here's part of the issue. Car shredders. Crushed cars don't just get dumped into big pits of molten steel, crushed cars get shredded with large high speed hammermills and the component materials - iron/steel, aluminum - get separated out by magnetic and eddy current separators. The rest is called Auto Shredder Residue and ends up landfilled. It's all the copper and the materials that used to be glass and plastic dashboards and o-rings in Macpherson struts and stuff like that.
If you haven't seen ASR
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If only the battery packs could be dropped out by loosening a few bolts...
You'd probably want to take the copper-filled motors out, too.
In other words: Things need to change.
(and it will be an improvement, despite all the whining)
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Copper and aluminum will both come out at the same time from the eddy current separators. Given most of the aluminium (unless it has an aluminum body) is in the engine, it is simpler to drop the engine from the shell before crushing/shredding.
Certainly in the EU/UK that's not a legal disposal method. You have to remove much of the car before it it can be crushed/shredded. A minimum all the oil, fuel etc. has to be drained. Same for an lead acid battery in there, though it would be crazy stupid to pass that
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Kinda.
We've already got experience with electronic waste, and that hasn't gone well. If it is really assumed that electric cars will be the next standard, best to start thinking about it now before it starts piling up like nuclear waste.
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We will dispose of lithium batteries from cars the same way we dispose of e-waste... send it via boat to another country until they stop refusing it. Or just send it by boat to some deep sea area, and have a storm "accidentally" cause the cargo ships's stuff to go for a visit to Davy Jones's Locker.
Foisting waste on someone else has always been the way to do so, and will continue to be the way to do it, as people move to more "ecologically responsible" cars and away from recyclable internal combustion engi
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People who keep saying EVs are worst than ICE vehicles always seem to calculate everything from beginning to end for EVs, but only the pollution made for ICE vehicles after all that fuel is ready to use.
So my question to you is this: did you really count all the waste and pollution needed to find, extract, refine and transport the oil between all transformation points for all the fuel used during the lifetime of that car? Let's be generous and say a car battery only lasts a decade, then calculate all that f
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Exactly that.
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But it's not necessary to do that. Electricity can be generated in a lot of ways. An ICE engine can only work by burning some kind of liquid fuel, which means whatever the source, you still need all the steps I listed in my original post. EVs, on the other hand, run on electricity that can be generated in multiple ways, from multiple sources. Batteries are also a component that can be changed to different types (ex: Li-ion vs LiFePO4
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If you know of a reliable and clean liquid fuel, please let everyone know. If it also happens to work in current ICE vehicles, even better.
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Re:wait for availability... (Score:4, Informative)
Quite a few things, one made, cannot be unmade very easily.
Used tires are a great example of this. Once vulcanized, there's no cost effective way to reprocess rubber. A few efforts have been made to make useful products from shredded tires, but there's been a few snags [theguardian.com] with that, too.
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Once vulcanized, there's no cost effective way to reprocess rubber.
Partly that's because making new rubber is really, really cheap.
Re: wait for availability... (Score:3)
We use them as fuel at work, shredded to pieces about 5 to 10 cm.
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Fuel for what? Shop heater/boiler?
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No, large scale heating - cement factory. Any contamination is absorbed and will be part of the cement.
So we can consume a few hundred truck tires in no time.
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Any contamination is absorbed and will be part of the cement.
Isn't this just deferring the pollution down the road? Concrete is remarkable for how long it lasts in the best case, but in the worst case it fails surprisingly rapidly, and it often is broken up before it even breaks down because it's in the way. Heavy metals are released when tires are burned, for example, and they are going to be in the resulting product. Old concrete is used for fill, broken down for inclusion in aggregates, or just dumped along shorelines to make them break down more slowly; in all at
Re: wait for availability... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really an issue, the compounds are broken down and then you have the unique elements from the tires that binds to calcium. Tires are a lot of hydrocarbons, some steel from the cords and some sulfur. The sulfur is captured in a scrubber and will transit into gypsum that's a stabilizer material in cement.
A cement kiln today is a pretty complex system that can take care of a lot of stuff that's hard to dispose like solvents and old paint. The levels in the final cement will be very low from metals since the volume of calcium is magnitudes higher. Not many complex compounds are able to hold together at the 1450 degrees C that's in the hottest zone.
Only things I'd avoid would be radioactive material, explosives and nerve gas compounds. The first for obvious reasons that it's not breaking down in any temperature you can get in the kiln as it's a base element on atomic level. Explosives aren't good for the kiln and nerve gas is mostly if someone makes a mistake and drops the jar before it is put in the kiln.
In case you want to get rid of a body - well, it's just more raw material.
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That sounds like a stupid and dangerous idea. I mean, how are you able to drive your trucks with no tires?
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LOL!
Instead of sending used tires to a landfill, use them as fuel. Cement kilns are about the best place ever to burn anything you don't want to disappear without a trace.
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Cell phones have been using lithium ion batteries for over a decade.
One electric car has the same amount of battery material as 7000-10000 phones. An average phone battery stores around 10 Watt-hours of energy, and an average electric car right now has around 70-100 kilowatt-hours of energy.
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What's the point? There have been several billion cell phones made. I'd guess if you did the math, there's probably been nearly as much lithium used in phones as has been used in EVs.
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Re: wait for availability... (Score:1)
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Lithium batteries have been in everything for the past 15-20 years. EVs are only a fairly recent user of them. There's a lot of it already out there but there is no existing recycling facility in the US. A Canadian company is building a plant in an old Kodak facility in Rochester. At the moment, if you take spent lithium batteries to Batteries Plus, you have to pay THEM to take them off your hands. The reality is that they are going to stockpile them until recycling is available and profitable. Even t
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That is why the cost of disposal must be included in the purchase price.
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curious.
why not redesign the lithium battery to be repairable.
what would that repair process be like
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The main reason is that lithium is cheap. When the price starts to rise in the OMG APOCALYPSE CHINA!!11 that Slashdot keeps predicting, we'll start recycling all those piled up batteries in a hurry.
Re:wait for availability... (Score:4, Informative)
Phone batteries are a much harder challenge. Loose, small, individual, countless formats and different chemistries... it's an annoying feedstock. On the upside, they have a much higher cobalt fraction, which is the most valuable mineral available for recovery (not "lithium" as the Slashdot summary wrongly suggests). Even though the trend is away from cobalt.
All automakers have battery recycling partners, though how many operate at a profit and what the recovery rates are remains unclear. As a general rule, though, what you get is "downcycling" - batteries are manufactured from raw materials, recycling recovers them in different forms, and then these are used to make either other types of batteries or non-battery products. We're starting to see the beginning of closed-loop systems, however - for example, Redwood Materials is now recycling batteries [techcrunch.com] from Teslas, and selling the copper recovered back to Panasonic at Gigafactory Nevada to make new foils for new cells. They're still not buying the lithium carbonate, nickel powder or mixed-metal sulphates and powders produced by Redwood, however. I suspect the new 4680s will be easier to make fully closed-loop.
Note that the vast majority of what's recycled today is not from cars, but rather manufacturing scrap. Namely because the volumes available to recycle from used vehicles predominantly reflect what was being sold a decade or more ago, in a market that's been growing ~50% YoY since then. Scrap volumes are much higher. It'll be a long time before recycled packs make up a meaningful fraction of total production.
Lithium.. (Score:2)
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Most lithium is mined by pumping underground water deposits to the surface.
No, most lithium is produced in Australia using open pit ore mining [volkswagenag.com]. But most lithium is located in Chile, and further, it's in salars (salt deserts) where it can be extracted using brining.
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As I recall most lithium is mined by extraction from salt flats and brine lakes. This is still mining but not as most people imagine it. The lithium is extracted from the ground more like we drill for petroleum than dig up coal. This is a lot like hydraulic fracturing in that water is pumped into the ground, the desired product abraded and dissolved, the resulting mixture collected, and the desired product separated out. The difference is that the lithium is in solution rather than like oil which is in
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I'm hoping civilization lasts long enough to develop tiny robots that can mine landfills for valuable metals.
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The landfill down the road keeps getting fined for the leachites that escape, especially the mercury is frowned on. They've become pretty fancy with trying to stop it, rubber membranes and such but it still rains on it and the rain has to go somewhere.
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Windmill blades are mostly fibreglass: sand and plastic.
it's only not worth recycling (Score:2)
because we subsidize the pollution and environmental degradation if it is mined, just like we subsidize oil and gas extraction.
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
https://www.bbc.com/future/art... [bbc.com]
not as quantitative as i would like , but the fact is that lithium mining, as MOST mining uses a lot of water.
and right now. the largest reserves naturally seem to be in places without much water...
"False Goals" that ignore pragmatic solutions! (Score:2)
ARRGH! I am very upset by "recycling" topics like this, as they always focus on the wrong issues.
From a recycling perspective, complex products are NEVER recycled in one step. More typically, you do "cascade" recycling, where the first step optimizes the recovery of the easiest material to access, and what's left behind is fed to a second process to extract the second-easiest material. The processes used for each step may be COMPLETELY different, though intermediate steps may be needed to make the output
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ARRGH! I am very upset by "recycling" topics like this, as they always focus on the wrong issues.
I stopped reading after the 2nd sentence. Lithium batteries are only a fire danger during disassembly if you disassemble them when they are fully charged. This is a trivial problem to solve. Just run the battery to depletion before recycling. Duh.
Crushing an ICE car is also dangerous if you do it while the gas tank is full.
Re:"False Goals" that ignore pragmatic solutions! (Score:4, Interesting)
Lithium batteries are only a fire danger during disassembly if you disassemble them when they are fully charged.
No, they are a fire hazard if they have any charge.
This is a trivial problem to solve. Just run the battery to depletion before recycling. Duh.
Completely depleting a battery of charge is quite difficult, and carries a fire hazard of it's own. If there is a bad cell in a battery then it can be a high resistance element, an electric heater in the middle of what is much like flash paper. Attempting to discharge the battery before disassembly and a bad cell could get hot, possibly hot enough to ignite the adjacent cells. This then gets back to the problem of disassembly of the battery while it still carries a charge because if you are to separate out the cells to discharge them individually then you run the risk of puncture, short circuit, or whatever else might set off thermal runaway in cells that still contain a charge.
Because the batteries contain both the fuel and oxidizer the fires are notorious for being difficult to extinguish. It's not enough to remove the air like in most fires. To put them out it is vital to remove heat at a rate faster than it is being produced so that the temperature gets low enough that the chemical reaction is no longer self sustaining. Because the chemistry in the battery isn't going to have an exact match of oxygen to fuel the removal of oxygen will still be important.
This is not a trivial problem.
What I expect to be the solution is to intentionally burn the batteries. Perhaps burn them in something even more reactive than oxygen, like fluorine. Then as a hot lithium fluoride salt they can use techniques to chemically process the resulting molten mess that is being developed to process salts used in molten salt electrochemical batteries, nuclear fission reactors, concentrated solar thermal systems, and thermal energy storage systems. These all have similar chemistries, a lithium fluoride salt mixed with other salts to aid in keeping the mix liquid at the desired temperature, and mixed with things that they want to get out. Heat can be added to the system to drive the chemistry by electric resistance heating, nuclear fission, concentrated solar, or more and more charged lithium batteries added to the fire. As a liquid the chemistry can be like something dissolved in water or alcohol, with gasses bubbled through to grab certain elements and them bubble out. Perhaps elements can be electroplated out, much like aluminum is refined.
My point is that there's been a lot of work on dealing with lithium getting real hot and then performing various chemical processes with lithium and other stuff dissolved in a salt. The lithium cells burning is not a problem because the burning is part of the process. With EV batteries the chemical reactor vessels may have to be quite large. This will be a balance of the hazards of a really hot, very large, reactor vessel to minimize the disassembly, to the hazards of trying to break the batteries down to smaller more manageable bits.
I believe that rather than try to discharge the batteries we will see people that just use the energy in the batteries to aid in melting it down into a liquid that they know how to process. In this state it is hot but it is chemically inert, it won't get hotter all of the sudden on it's own. The processing vat can be part of a thermal energy storage system. Heat can go in from nuclear fission, heat going out through what are much like jet turbines to run generators, or heat for desalinate water, or synthesize hydrocarbon fuels. Perhaps the lithium will not be recycled but consumed in a fusion boosted fission reactor to produce electricity or power interplanetary rockets.
A big problem in recycling most anything is the energy involved. When dealing with nuclear fission and fusion there's some chemical elements that have shown to be valuable. Lithium is among them. If this lithium is worthless for EV batteries then maybe it has value in the nuclear power industry.
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Completely depleting a battery of charge is quite difficult, and carries a fire hazard of it's own. If there is a bad cell in a battery
The battery is being broken down anyway, so you break it down into cells and then discharge cells individually. This would be tedious as part of a manual process but automation makes that irrelevant.
A big problem in recycling most anything is the energy involved. When dealing with nuclear fission
...you get a hard-on. We all know already. But look, either the batteries having energy in them is a real problem or it isn't. If it is then it's also a solution, because you can use that energy in the recycling process. If it isn't then what was the point of your post in the first place? Just make up your mind.
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The catch-22 just went right over your head, didn't it?
To safely discharge the cells in a worn out battery the cells need to be separated. To safely separate the cells from each other then need to be discharged completely first. There is no trivial solution to this.
"False Goals" ignore pragmatic (Score:2)
Quantity counts (Score:2)
Well, there's also quantities to consider as well. The article seems to treat the large size of an EV power pack as a problem, when in reality it should be more of an opportunity. We don't bother recycling those tiny coin batteries that are in hearing aids and such very much because it's a lot of work to collect those up for recycling. Meanwhile, recycling the lead-acid batteries in cars is viable not only because lead-acid is easy to recycle, but because lead acid batteries tend to be pretty big, giving
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The most common initial "false goal" of recycling is to make recycling "energy efficient". If renewable energy sources are used, this simply isn't a concern.
If the river were a whisky and I were a duck, then that sentence wouldn't have made me say what the fuck. Most energy doesn't come from renewable sources, and until it does, this will still be a concern. Energy is fungible, so if someone is using up the power from the renewables then someone else is using power from non-renewables.
Bottom-line, the recycling MUST be done at a cost that's lower than mining, else nobody will bother without onerous government "incentives".
So what you're saying is that it doesn't have to be cheaper than mining as long as the government steps in? Okay, that makes sense. What they need to do is set a carbon tax, since
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It's only not a concern if we have enough renewable energy to do everything. If we don't, then we have to choose if a unit of renewable energy is going to be used to supplant fossil fuel energy, or recycle batteries, or something else.
Terrorism on demand. (Score:4, Insightful)
Jodie Lutkenhaus, a professor of chemical engineering at Texas A&M University, has been working on a battery that is made of organic substances that can degrade on command.
Ah, a new form of terrorism.
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I can't wait for the first virus that modifies your laptop battery firmware and self destructs the battery.
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Discharge as far as possible? (Score:2)
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Would discharging the batteries as far as possible help with reducing the possibility of explosively releasing this energy?
I think the Navy believes so. Care is taken to completely discharge "large" batteries and capacitors according to a friend who worked on such things aboard ship. Might be archaic stuff, my friend served on some old ships, 60s era tech.
We will likely end up using pyro-processing. (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a lot of research going into high temperature chemistry, called "pyro-processing". This is a process where things are made so hot that nearly everything melts. The stuff that isn't liquid turns to gases or solidifies, which are collected and separated out. The gases are often processed in a very typical matter of reacting them with something to separate them out and/or turn them into something desirable. What doesn't melt will sink to the bottom, float to the top, or be in suspension, which is then filtered out by various means. The most common pyro-processing being looked at right now is actually relevant here, it's a molten lithium salt. In this processing under investigation there will be a variety of different chemical elements that will bubble out, be in solution, or remain solids, and by being a liquid the processing looks in many ways like dissolving things in water, alcohol, or whatever, except everything is really hot.
Why is there so much interest in pyro-processing? Because that's integral to getting molten salt nuclear fission reactors to work.
Oh, molten salts are also of interest for concentrated solar power, many different kinds of electrochemical storage batteries, and thermal energy storage systems. If we get a salt hot enough to melt then we can do some interesting chemistry with it. We can also use the heat in the salts to run turbines, the kind that are very similar to natural gas turbines used to generate electricity and propel large seagoing vessels.
I expect the solution to our issues of lithium recycling to be solved with pyro-processing. The chemistry of high temperature lithium salts are being looked into for concentrated solar power, thermal and electrochemical energy storage, and nuclear fission power. It's the nuclear fission part where this is most relevant, the chemistry is mostly about separating out fission products and with battery recycling it's also about separating out different chemical elements. The problem with pyro-processing is usually about the energy in getting everything hot, but with nuclear fission the heat generation is the entire reason everything is so hot. So, nuclear fission is likely how the pyro-processing of lithium battery waste will be powered.
I know people will accuse me of nuclear power fanboyism, which will be accurate as that is precisely what this is.
Re: We will likely end up using pyro-processing. (Score:2)
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Molten salt solar power is also obsolete, because while it was cost competitive when it first came out, photovoltaic solar has become far cheaper per watt hour. The one in Nevada shut down and now there's only one left operating in the world.
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If molten salt solar power could recycle lithium batteries then that would change the economics. That's the point I'm making here, getting salts hot can do more than produce electricity. It's quite likely to see a dual use facility, when the heat is not needed for electricity then it's used to melt lithium. This could be one way to aid in the process of load following from power plants.
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It's possible, I'm just saying it's less likely than if people were building them for solar power anyway.
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Agreed. A current near nonexistent solar thermal power industry will make future adoption less likely. That is the state of things today, but that's not necessarily how things will remain.
Automation? (Score:2)
Roughly how much R&D $ until it can be automated with AI or whatnot?
Might explode -- that's what the robots are for (Score:2)
But Li batteries are made up of lots of different parts that could explode if they're not disassembled carefully.
That's why it should be done by robots. When Tesla, GM, Ford, whoever designs a battery they should also design the robot that will disassemble it.
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How would that make them any money?
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In some states retailers who sell items which use rechargeable batteries are required to take them back.
Extend this to automakers and it will be unprofitable not to do it.
Right now it's cheaper to get virgin materials, but that's only because that price is predicated upon environmental damage — most lithium comes from pit mines in Australia, for example. Make unsustainable practices unprofitable and the industry will act sustainably.
Capitalism isn't sustainable without regulation.
Nothing is sustainable without regulation (Score:2)
Capitalism isn't sustainable without regulation.
Nothing is sustainable without regulation. Look at the ecological disaster that Socialism brought to Eastern Europe during the Soviet Era.
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Well, fair point. Even Monarchy managed to do a number on certain forests, so perhaps the message here is that we should give a care for our life support system and generally don't
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How would that make them any money?
Because the automaker then recycles the Lithium for new its production of batteries. Its a scarce resource and going to get scarcer.
We're not going to keep burning dinosaurs (Score:2)
That's what you're going for, right? Smear the electric vehicules, so that you can rake in the petroleum dollars some more years.
Re: We're not going to keep burning dinosaurs (Score:2)
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Perfect is the enemy of good. The reason you're seeing this however has nothing to do with someone trying to get ahead of a future problem. It's FUD. The ICE industry is desperately trying to throw shade on electric cars, and what would be better than getting people to think that EVs are an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen. Hit'em where it hurts.
Taken apart wrong (Score:1)
Nowhere on the linked to page does it say that. If you're going to quote, then quote.
They said, "incorrectly", because, you know, English.
Redwood Materials (Score:5, Informative)
The answer is "yes".
Redwood materials already have a process that enables 95% recovery. Quote, from redwoodmaterials.com
> Redwood’s technology can recover on average 95 percent of materials like nickel, cobalt, copper, aluminum, lithium and graphite in a lithium-ion battery.
> These valuable materials can then go directly back into the supply chain to make batteries for new electric vehicles and energy storage products.
And before anyone shouts "snake-oil", it's lead by JB Straubel, who is about the safest pair of hands I know of.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The parent comment deserves more upvotes.
For anyone who doesn't know who JB Straubel is, he was one of the co-founders of Tesla. You can think of him as being the Tesla equivalent of Apple's Steve Wozniak: a technical expert. He played a huge role in the development of Tesla's batteries, electric motors, super chargers and so on. He left Tesla in 2017 to set up Redwood Materials, because he realised that a few years after the market for electric vehicles started growing exponentially, there would be a need
Design for Disassembly (Score:2)
The only problem here is the one that's not mentioned - manufacturers would fight any such requirement because it increases cost.
It would probaby help ... (Score:2)
Lithium batteries don't explode (Score:2)
They do burn rather handily. So one solution is just to burn them as step one. You'll need to capture the (toxic) smoke. Once they've burned out, you've got a mess of solids you can deal with without worrying about fire hazard.
Lithium, the VHS of the battery world (Score:2)
Lithium, popularised by a really rich guy and a few others.
There's better batteries for different applications but for some dumb reason Lithium is used.
I worked for a lithium battery company and everyone there called their batteries bombs,
because that's what they are.
Any new product this dangerous shouldn't be accepted as safe for general use.
We hold these things up to the side of our heads and put them in cars
and all sorts of stupid places.
When they burn you can't stop them burning.
end rant.