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Electric Vehicle Recycling Is Starting In California (protocol.com) 82

Posted by BeauHD from the reuse-and-recycle dept.
Redwood Materials, founded by ex-Tesla CTO J.B. Straubel, is launching an electric vehicle battery-recycling program in California. Automakers Ford and Volvo are the first to partner with the Carson City, Nevada-based company. Protocol reports: Redwood Materials announced in a press release this week that it will be collecting and recycling hybrid and EV battery packs at the end of their useful life into new battery materials. It says it will accept all lithium-ion and nickel metal hydride batteries in the state of California. Though hybrids have been around for decades, we're still a few years out from the first major wave of EV getting retired from the road. But Redwood Materials is not alone in getting a head start on developing recycling technology and infrastructure to deal with the coming influx of tapped-out batteries. Last year, Massachusetts-based startup Ascend Elements announced a partnership with Honda to provide the automaker with new cathodes made from recycled lithium-ion batteries, with plans to build the largest battery recycling plant in North America.

Redwood Materials currently recycles more than 6 gigawatt hours of batteries each year, enough for 60,000 EVs, according to the company. Volvo is aiming for its lineup to be fully electric by 2030 and be a circular business by 2040, something battery recycling will help it achieve. Ford's carbon-neutral target date is 2050, and the company had previously invested $50 million in Redwood Materials. "It goes without saying that California is in the front lines of climate change," Gov. Gavin Newsom said in the company's promotional video. "With raging wildfires and record droughts, we know there's no time to waste."
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Electric Vehicle Recycling Is Starting In California More

Electric Vehicle Recycling Is Starting In California

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  • The fundamental principle of minimising environmental impact is to, where possible, reduce what you use (turn the heating down 5 degrees ; drive at 55 (whatever units) instead of 70.

    After reducing usage, re-use what you have left. So when you're generating power needing high temperatures, you get lower temperature as a waste product - but you can re-use that for regional heating. (If you thought to design things efficiently - which businesses aren't very good at doing.) When you've got a vehicle up to high

    • When you've got a vehicle up to highway speed, you can re-use that kinetic energy by using regenerative breaking

      Only if you're driving in a vacuum.

      In real life the amount of energy you can recover through braking is a very tiny percentage of the total.

      PS: Cars have "brakes", not "breaks". I resisted the urge to ask you how "regenerative breaking" works.

      but it is really just scaling up and scaling out a process that has been going on since Ug the caveman took one chip too many off his hand axe and decided to make a leather-scraper instead.

      So? The EV naysayers are always asking what will happen to all those batteries. Here we have an answer.

      • > In real life the amount of energy you can recover through braking is a very tiny percentage of the total.

        Literally nobody has ever claimed it's 100% efficient. However I can challenge the "tiny percentage" part on the grounds that it's highly situational.

        My daily commute is almost exactly 5 miles one-way.

        My car tells me about how much extra driving distance I gain from regenerative breaking every time I slow down. If I add it all up, it's just over a mile in total recovered range. That's over 20% recov

        • Like for taxis, buses, & police & delivery vehicles, right? That's a lot of recovered mileage right there.

          • Driving in cities is very different than driving on highways, obviously.

            • 83% of Americans live in urban areas - up from 64% in 1950. It is estimated that it will be 89% by 2050. People focusing on highway driving in America haven't taken a look at American driving today. The great American road trip is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The new generations don't know what you're talking about half the time if you bring it up. They're like, "why don't you fly and then uber"?
              • And city dwellers generally don't need a car. Renting one is a lot more cost efficient for those occasions that you do sort-of need one. When I was working, my car would sit, un-touched, for 6 months of the year outside the house (or more often, in the locked parking lot at work, this being far safer than on the street in-town). Now, it's sitting unused 80% of the time - It's over 10 days since I last got into it. A waste of insurance money, road tax and worry cluttering up the road outside the house on the

                • There's a big difference between city and urban. For example, the Orlando city population is 280K. The Orlando metropolitan area population is 2.5 million. The urban numbers I quoted are mostly folks like me. I commute 26 miles each way every day without leaving the metropolitan area or touching a highway.

                  If Tesla ever gets the self driving down so that shared vehicle transportation can undercut the cost per mile of owning your vehicle, I'm there. No more personal vehicle for my 80ish drives per month. Unti

                  • There's going to come a point - don't ask me when - when the number of autonomous (or semi-autonomous) vehicles on the road reaches a payback point that the predictability of (semi-)autonomous vehicle meeting (semi-)autonomous vehicle and avoiding a collision (in large part because both vehicles communicate their intentions to each other, and passers by) becomes a sufficiently common occurrence that you will need to pay a significant premium on your insurance for operating a vehicle without the autonomy tur
            • And you seemed to be the one who was thinking about driving on highways. Not me.

        • Stop-start traffic works best, obviously.

          "Highway speed" (as mentioned in the OP)? Not so much.

      • Re:Reduce, reuse, recycle - all first posts? (Score:4, Informative)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Saturday February 26, 2022 @07:24AM (#62305753)

        In real life the amount of energy you can recover through braking is a very tiny percentage of the total.

        That depends on the situation.

        For highway driving, yeah, nearly all the energy is lost to aerodynamic drag.

        But for stop-and-go traffic in a city or driving in hilly terrain, regen-braking can be a big win.

        • That's the big benefit with hybrids where the battery assists the engine, all those starts and stops, or even small accelerations and decelerations, are smoothed out. Like getting highway driving mileage while in the city.

          • Right, but Hybrids represent a worst case for TCO of electrified vehicles. Prius (and to a lesser extent because of lesser production, Insight) proved that you can still have a reliable vehicle that's a hybrid, but you have to spend big on reliability. It's not cheap to design engines that are that reliable. Toyota and Honda were the obvious candidates to do it, since they clearly know more about it than anyone else.

            To my mind there are only three classes of vehicle worth building, mild hybrid, plug-in hybr

            • Right now I have Prisu plug-in hybrid, which is great. No gas for the short trips or commute, but gas for the few times that a long trip is needed. Previously I had a hybrid and I did like it. It was very efficient and reliable. Honda Insight; so big coil that either gives electric assist to the engine or a generator to recharge the battery during deceleration (it's a different style than the Prius hybrid types).

              Yes, mass transit is best. It's so rare in California though; it gets used by it's got a neg

      • Re:Reduce, reuse, recycle - all first posts? (Score:4, Informative)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Saturday February 26, 2022 @08:53AM (#62305885) Homepage Journal

        In real life the amount of energy you can recover through braking is a very tiny percentage of the total.

        Bollocks. In real life it's between 16 and 70 percent depending on the system and how rapidly you decelerate. Even 16% is not tiny, although it's fairly small. In typical use regen extends range by 10-15%. Per Wikipedia (where the math is shown [wikipedia.org]) regen is estimated to improve overall efficiency by 14% in town and 3% on motorways. This is really quite substantial, frankly, unless you are doing mostly long trips where drag is more of a factor, and there is much less braking.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        In the real world passenger car drivers experience anything from a 15-30% range extension through regenerative braking, depending on the mix of driving types they do. That's not tiny by any means.

        YMMV. If you do nearly all highway speed driving the energy you recover will indeed by tiny because the vast majority of energy you use is irretrievably lost to turbulence. If you use your EV exclusively as a neighborhood vehicle you'll recover an even larger percentage of your energy because so much of that ene

      • PS: Cars have "brakes", not "breaks". I resisted the urge to ask you how "regenerative breaking" works.

        Obviously the vehicle separates itself upon slowing and then when it comes time to accelerate, it joins up again. As you can see here [reddit.com] the vehicle separates itself when slowing down. Once it floats to the other side, it will reassemble and carry on. I assume.

      • Wow you're a dick.

    • You didn't make a worthwhile point because EVs already represent what you're talking about. Reduce, they are more efficient. Reuse, the vast majority of batteries are reused and not... Recycle[d], what happens when they're no longer useful.

      Government has largely been punting on the battery recycling issue to the point that it can be difficult to get rid of many lithium batteries correctly, e.g. RC or drone battery packs. What we need to see is laws requiring retailers to take back batteries.

      • Government has largely been punting on the battery recycling issue

        Why do you believe battery recycling is a problem for the government to solve?

        • Incentivize, not solve. The free market doesn't wipe its own ass without being forced to do so. Nor does it choose a decent place to shit.

          • Incentivize, not solve.

            Why? If it is cheaper to mine new lithium than to recycle, then toss the batteries in the landfill. Lithium isn't rare or toxic, so who cares?

            If it is cost-effective to recycle, the free market will do so. If it isn't, we shouldn't be squandering money on it.

            • Why? If it is cheaper to mine new lithium than to recycle, then toss the batteries in the landfill. Lithium isn't rare or toxic, so who cares?

              Because the battery as a whole can be toxic even if the lithium isn't. And lo, it is. Maybe upcoming glass batteries will solve that. But we've reached peak sand so we can't just throw those away either.

              Waste is stupid and unnecessary. It's better to save your resources against future needs. Cheaper is not the end all.

            • Problem with that is the market is distorted. The car company buying or building the batteries does not have to pay the environmental cost for the pollution the mining and supply chain operation generates. Making those externalities part of the cost analysis for companies is something the government likely has to do, the market wont account for it because they have no reason to unless forced.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

              Why? If it is cheaper to mine new lithium than to recycle, then toss the batteries in the landfill. Lithium isn't rare or toxic, so who cares?

              If it is cost-effective to recycle, the free market will do so. If it isn't, we shouldn't be squandering money on it.

              Lithium battery recycling is already a thing. It's not scaling up because the supply of used lithium batteries is the bottleneck - there just aren't enough of them to feed the recyclers.

              And it IS economical to recycle them - not for the lithium, but for

              • Sounds like a good reason to target California as the initial market - they've had a substantial electric car niche growing for decades, so the volume of batteries leaving the road has no doubt grown to among the highest to be had anywhere. Quite possibly enough to make a large large-scale recycling pilot plant financially viable.

                After all, the number of retired batteries is increasing rapidly, worldwide, with no end in sight. There are soon to be vast fortunes to be made by anyone who can rapidly deploy

        • Why do you believe battery recycling is a problem for the government to solve?

          Because business won't, if left by themselves. Business will gladly jump at any opportunity to externalize costs, and let others pay to clean up the business's pollution and garbage.

          Now, solving the battery issue doesn't mean the government should recycle the batteries itself. What it should do is ensure those externalized costs come back to the polluters. This can be done via regulation, taxes (e.g, carbon tax), incentives given to clean businesses and so on.

      • Government has largely been punting on the battery recycling issue to the point that it can be difficult to get rid of many lithium batteries correctly, e.g. RC or drone battery packs. What we need to see is laws requiring retailers to take back batteries.

        But they do. It's been part of WEER (Waste Electrical Equipment Regulations) since ... the thick end of a decade ago.

        Don't they apply in your area? Elect better politicians. Or move to the civilized world.

    • You scavenged battery plates into diving weights? So you handled lead pieces coated with biologically available lead compounds in order to have lead weights?

      I heard that one of the signs of heavy-metal poisoning including lead exposure is that it makes a person mentally "off."

      • Depending on where he lives, he may have been already exposed to biologically available lead compounds anyway.
      • I used this complex piece of technology called a "glove". You may hear them being put on during your search on re-entry to the Secure Unit.

        At least one person in this conversation has been handling toxins - organic and inorganic - in the chemistry lab for over 40 years. I don't know if you'd be let near them . Those pesky bottles, demanding that they be drunk from.

        FYI, we also had a stock of several kilos of lead water pipes that we'd removed as part of re-plumbing and re-wiring the house when we move in.

    • After a car battery pack is not acceptable for use in a car, it may still be fine for use in a home, to store power (solar, off-hours, etc.) and supply it when needed (cloudy, peak). Reuse does not mean you have to take it apart to salvage the materials.
      • Correct.

        They had been used for a time in the shed but were too shoddy for that too. too heavy to casually haul to and fro. So we reduced the plates to lead - a more useful and less biologically available form.

        This was long before solar panel power systems were a credible domestic solution. Between Dad and I we had the skills to design, build, install and run such a system, but neither of us was interested in the project and never wasted more time on it beyond the most cursory back-of-a-thumbnail calculati

  • I guess Nevada is just part of California now.

    Carson City, Nevada-based company.

    vs.

    "It goes without saying that California is in the front lines of climate change," Gov. Gavin Newsom said in the company's promotional video.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
      A company may have an HQ in Timbuktu, but the service offered may be entirely within California apart from that. There's a lot of physical stuff involved, here.

      • Indeed. California has one of the highest state corporate income tax rates. Nevada has none.

        Carson City is less than 20 km from the California state line.

        • The part of Carson City that has people and businesses is 40 km. The Tahoe east shore being officially part of the city is an anomaly of the city being a county, the real Carson City is on the other side of the mountain range.

          But yes, they certainly have businesses that service California while evading tax.

        • They're the 8th highest in the nation, so I guess you're not technically wrong, but they're not in the top 5.
          Nevada has no income tax, but they have gross receipt taxes on corporations, which are generally considered more harmful and regressive.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
          The point I was making, though, is the service being offered is physically within California. The OP's point doesn't really hold just because of the corporate HQ's location.

  • (which I don't know anything about, hence the question)

    If I buy an old ICE car, I can judge the miles and look at repair records and decide if it's worth buying and approx how much money it's going to take to keep it running and.

    With an old EV...what's a replacement battery pack cost? Is this something that has to be replaced entirely, or do individual cells go bad and can just be replaced?

    Seems to me that would be a pretty big expense all at once to replace an entire battery pack, and as such would affect

    • The battery will usually last the life of the car.

      It makes little sense to put a new battery pack in a beat-up 20-year-old car.

      • Really depends on the quality of the battery pack, and its cooling. Nissan Leaf batteries sure didn't last for the expected life of the vehicle.

        The hybrid battery in my 2001 Prius failed at 8 years 3 months and 94k miles. Warranty was 8 years/100k. I had a new battery put in. Sold the vehicle 2 years later.

        The battery in my 2017 Bolt started seeing serious degradation in 2020 and had a module replaced. And then the entire pack was replaced last month due to the recall.

        So yes, batteries can and do degrade. T

        • The good news for Leaf owners is that a replacement upgraded battery pack is surprisingly affordable.

          I've long fantasized about repowering a 240Z with a Leaf powertrain. Unfortunately all the ones I can afford are mostly rust

      • There is an episode of 'Fully Charged' where Robert Llwellyn gets a new battery for his 2013 Leaf. Doubled the range (from the original battery).
        I suggest that you watch it and learn. But... that is old technology.
        Modern EV's have batteries that will last hundreds of thousands of miles. Google 'million mile battery'.

        Yes, sometimes a few cells will go bad. In most cars, these can be replaced without needing to dump/recycle the whole battery. That may not be possible with Tesla's new Structural Battery. I kno

        • Yeah, the structural battery worries me. It could be a real nightmare for repair, salvage, and even recycling, depending on the details. And I've yet to see any details.

          • The generation of batteries going into the structural pack should beat the life of the car in the vast majority of cases.

            That said, I don't like it just because it makes what I believe to be the best way to handle old battery packs near impossible. When a battery pack gets below 80% capacity, it should be moved on to a utility or home storage second life until it hits 40% or less capacity,,, probably longer than the first life. Space and weight are not a significant factor in those applications so the capac

            • >I don't like it just because it makes what I believe to be the best way to handle old battery packs near impossible.

              Not necessarily. If you assume the batteries almost always outlast the car, then a structural battery module may be relatively easy to remove. Perhaps not as easy as a modular battery, but once you consider the surrounding car to be so much scrap metal to cut away, the extraction becomes much simpler. Getting them out of their structural casing to replace or repurpose individual cells m

              • I did see a note somewhere that the seats will be bolted to the pack. That sounds as though everything below your feet is the battery pack. And that would make sense if the design goal was to achieve maximum elimination of redundant structure. I guess that could still be considered "modular", but the module may include some oddities like interior carpet.
            • "When a battery pack gets below 80% capacity, it should be moved on" - i think that depends on the original range of that battery, if its 400+miles and it gets to 80% of capacity, the range is still 320 and that should be fine for many people.

              • That could be, but usually by that point the surrounding car should be 20 years old and trashed.

                Most users always charge at home overnight. With no fast charging, full charging or full discharging, the structural generation will likely have a bell curve peaking somewhere beyond 500K miles for the 80% point. They seem to think they've reached the design that will give them the million mile battery they seek.

                I think people who go for the 400+ mile battery if they don't think they'll be needing more than say,

    • With a used EV, you can get specific data on the battery's health, and you can easily know what to expect going forward. The drivetrain is so mechanically simple that a short test drive will reveal any strange noises or whatever (that you might miss on an ICE engine which isn't as quiet). There's not much room for problems to hide.

      That's a lot harder to do with an ICE where anything less than a deep dive inspection will not tell you if there's anything wrong just below the surface.

      That said, options for rep

      • Old-hand car tinkerers claim cars are impossible to repair because they have turned into a computer.

        That a modern ICE car is a computer makes it easier to diagnose and repair. Just plug it into a high-end "scan tool" and read the data, the way Scotty does.

        • Scotty Kilmer is a chucklefuck who shows off how shit his hack job repairs are on youtube. He clearly has a lot of automotive repair experience, but some of the shit he's done has been clearly garbage. "I just finished repairing the frame on this toyota pickup" when it's a newer frame you're not supposed to weld on and he didn't even fucking cover his plating with paint.

          Scan tools are cool and they tell you a lot of stuff but often the error is misleading. There's no question that it was a lot easier to fix

          • Amen.

            Though I'm even more in favor of electrical vehicles that radically reduce the number of required sensors and moving parts - after all the most reliable part is no part.

            I am however considerably less impressed with the trend to make electrical cars into complicated computerized nightmares. I mean, the electric car predates the existence of the internal combustion engine for a reason - there's absolutely no need for them to be any more complicated than an electric bicycle.

            I suppose a lot of it is that

            • Yeah, I really wish they would use a bus for sensors instead of a zillion wires. I'm frankly fairly amazed it hasn't happened yet. There are automotive grade attiny chips, if I ever do a megasquirt car I'm gonna do something of that nature.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      With an old EV...what's a replacement battery pack cost? Is this something that has to be replaced entirely, or do individual cells go bad and can just be replaced?

      A manufacturer can tell you how much a replacement pack is.

      And the onboard electronics can tell you how aged the battery is, because that's information that's kept by the battery management circuits. Heck, you laptop has that information available to it.

      As for replacements, well, manufacturers probably sell it as a big module, bu rebuilders often

      • 20% capacity loss after 100k miles is extremely rapid degradation. If capacity loss is linear or worse after that, it means the vehicle will require battery replacement long before the point a gas vehicle requires substantially increased maintenance from wear. I wouldn't want to buy an ev which degraded this fast either new or used. Fortunately real ev manufacturers and batteries seem to be dramatically better. Tesla claims only about 10% loss after 200k miles. See https://electrek.co/2021/08/12... [electrek.co] for m

  • Experience here in Ontario Canada (Score:3)

    by Goatbot ( 7614062 ) on Saturday February 26, 2022 @07:58AM (#62305789)
    Is that there will be some heavy competition in this arena. Where I live a 1000sqft home was about 50k CDN$ in 2015 today that same home pushing 400k . Why because Electra Battery Materials has obtained a fully permitted Battery Grade Cobalt Refinery for pennies on the dollar. Even with government support the capital burn rate is huge and still not actually producing anything.

    • So to be clear, you're claiming that homes in your area have octupled in value because someone built a battery recycling facility which isn't producing any batteries.

      You're going to have to draw a fucking flowchart to explain that one, because it doesn't make any sense at all.

      If it actually happened, though, it would be a great thing for homeowners.

      • Well no need to draw a flow chart. Realtor.ca Look up Nickel, Gold, Silver and PGM mining towns in Northern Ontario. The housing prices here have exploded. The pandemic did have an effect as well due to people leaving the city for more remote areas.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

          So it's *NOT* because of the recycling plant?

          Recycling Lion batteries is going to be tough. Nasty crap in them. Anytime electric storage is involved it tends to have nasty heavy metals and other nasties. People become - NIMBY. Where it's done home prices usually plummet. If that's what's happening where you are, you might want to think about bailing out.

          • The actual battery grade Cobalt refinery started the ball rolling. The fact they are going to expand into a full fledged battery materials park as found in China and Finland, push home prices over the edge. Great if you own a home not so great otherwise.
          • FWIW the area they are processing in is and has been for over 100yrs a toxic brown field from both nature and man. The naturally occurring lead and arsenic in the surrounding rock does not help make a case for cleaning it up either. Will see what happens. AFAIK they are getting black mass from Japan so much of the largest environmental and safety issues stay there.
  • Electric cars are not a new energy source. They require fossil fuels to manufacture. They use fossil fuels when they use electricity. They require an additional global geo-political layer for strategic minerals like cobalt. And they leave a huge environmental cleanup problem. So what are electric cars good for? Moving pollution from the cities where the wealthy live to the poorer rural areas where power plants and battery dumps are located.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mugnyte ( 203225 )
      Criticism without suggestion of a realistic alternative is the folly of curmudgeons. Get comfy in that armchair, we're switching energy from carbon chains to electrochemical paste across the globe over the next century. No other plight of humankind will be explicitly addressed by this change. But if you'd like to publish your thesis and present it to the world, everyone is listening. If it gets rejected, maybe you didn't consider all the nuances of the audience: primates caught in a Dunning-Kruger lockdo

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ksevio ( 865461 )

      Good thing oil has none of those problems!

      This may also come as a shock, but electricity can come from other sources than fossil fuels

    • They only require some fossil fuels to manufacture because the grid is not yet green and the supply chain is not yet all using EVs but the grid getting greener everyday and more people are getting EV trucks etc so that "argument" gets smaller and smaller. Unless you have a magic wand, you have to use the old tech to create the new tech. A slow transition from one to the other is inevitable as an overnight swap over is impossible.

    • Electric cars are not a new energy source.

      That's not news.

      They require fossil fuels to manufacture.

      We could have been putting in solar since the 1970s but the same tools (and corrupt CEOs) opposing EVs now were opposing solar power then.

      You know what else uses fossil fuels? ICEVs. Also, making fossil fuels, which takes a significant amount of energy. We take petroleum, which is mostly made from algae and other plants through the use of an immense amount of solar power, and we crack it open using energy — the process was started using wood and coal, and later shifted to using portion

      • "We could have been putting in solar since the 1970s but the same tools (and corrupt CEOs) opposing EVs now were opposing solar power then." If it paid off, people certainly would have. "You know what else uses fossil fuels? ICEVs. " Thanks Capt. Obvious. And burning them fossil fuels where the energy is used eliminates the energy loss of transmission as you have with Electric Cars. You think you are smart, but failed to even mention that significant inefficiency. The case is made by the experts - the

  • As a Calif taxpayer but not an EV user, just how much is this pleasure costing me?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mugnyte ( 203225 )
      You live in the funhouse and you complain about clowns. Do you hold your hand up to the ocean when the tide comes in?

  • Is there some bad blood between JB & Elon?

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