![]() Yan Wang, a materials science professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and co-author of the new study, started researching battery recycling 11 years ago. Army Research Laboratory, who was not involved in the study. The team’s approach and successful demonstration are “very unique and very impressive,” says Kang Xu, an electrochemist at the U.S. In fact, batteries with the recycled cathode both last longer and charge faster. The researchers found that batteries they made with their new cathode-recycling technique perform just as well as those with a cathode made from scratch. Consequences could be serious, particularly in an application such as an electric vehicle.īut new research published in Joule has hit upon what experts describe as a more elegant recycling method that refurbishes the cathode-the carefully crafted crystal that is the lithium-ion battery’s most expensive component and key to supplying the proper voltage. Battery manufacturers have hesitated over concerns that recycled products may be lower in quality than those built from newly mined minerals, potentially leading to shorter battery life or damage to the battery’s innards. But recycling lithium-ion batteries has only recently made commercial inroads. And mining also creates a host of environmental headaches-such as depleting local water resources and polluting the nearby region with runoff debris-that have led to protests against new mines.Īll of this means the ability to recycle existing batteries is crucial for sustainably shifting the global energy system. Establishing new mines is an expensive, years-long effort. But all of the world’s current mining operations cannot extract enough lithium and other key minerals to meet skyrocketing demand for these batteries. It is also inviting consumers to send in their battery-powered electronics to Redwood.Lithium-ion batteries are at the heart of nearly every electric vehicle, laptop and smartphone, and they are essential to storing renewable energy in the face of the climate emergency. Redwood isn’t restricted to car battery recycling. At the least, he said, Redwood will be setting up operations in California to collect batteries and prepare them for transport. Asked whether California will be a candidate for a new U.S. Straubel said that as the EV market grows, the company will build new plants, starting with Europe and an additional plant in the U.S. ![]() ![]() The Carson City plant currently employs about 300 workers. California is by far the largest market for electric vehicles in the U.S., so feeding dead batteries across the border into Nevada can keep those costs manageable, he said. But logistics and transportation account for a huge share of recycling costs, Straubel said. Market-size figures are hard to come by in this nascent industry, but according to London consulting firm Circular Energy Storage, there about a hundred companies worldwide that recycle lithium ion batteries or plan to do so. There, battery materials such as cobalt and copper will be extracted and transformed into new battery parts, then sold to battery makers - starting with Panasonic’s battery plant in Sparks, Nev. The automakers will work with their own dealers and with battery dismantlers to package and transport dead or near-dead electric vehicle batteries by truck to Redwood’s plant in Carson City. On Thursday, the company, Redwood Materials, announced a used battery collection program for California, with Ford and Volvo as project-launch partners. Their batteries depend on toxic metals whose mining and improper disposal cause environmental degradation, not to mention child-labor abuses in source countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo.įor the last 5 years, a Nevada company run by a Tesla co-founder has been attempting to address such problems with a battery recycling center in Nevada. Electric vehicles may be cleaner than gasoline or diesel fuel cars and trucks. ![]()
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