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Top Comments: Recycling EV Lithium Batteries [1]

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Date: 2022-11-13

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Some weeks ago, at a gathering of hubby’s family, hubby’s brother and brother-in-law (who are both Republicans) decided to diss electric cars by noting that once the batteries started permanently dying, they would end up choking landfills. Being the sole chemist present, I noted that lithium is 100% recyclable, and there was no good reason for the batteries to be sent unprocessed to landfills when the useful stuff could be recovered and reused. Usually I keep my mouth shut when Republicans start ranting, but it was a rare pleasure for me to shut this one down.

Well, it turns out that it’s not quite so simple. I found this article at Knowable Magazine which reviews the challenges of recovering the lithium and other valuable components of these batteries. Unfortunately, like most consumer products, lithium batteries for electric vehicles appear not to have been designed with the idea of recycling in mind.

EV batteries consist of complex combinations of not just lithium, but also cobalt, nickel, manganese, iron, or manganese, as well as copper, aluminum and graphite, as well as plastic components. It would be most advantageous to be able to recover all of these elements in a usable form. Unfortunately, the current principal technique for recovery gf metals from EV batteries, called pyrometallurgy, involves melting down the batteries and burning off the plastic. It is energy-intensive, releases toxic pollutants and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and manages to lose all of the lithium.

Fortunately, researchers are developing other methods. One is called direct recycling, where the aim is the recover as much of the cathode material (lithium metal oxide doped with other metals, such as cobalt, nickel, manganese and/or iron). A second method, called hydrometallurgy, seeks to recover the various elements by applying chemical techniques to separate the various battery components and recover the useful elements.

Currently, the price of recycled lithium is five times that newly mined lithium, but as demand for electric vehicles increases and these new recycling schemes are worked up to scale, that situation will be reversed. This is an opportunity to get resource recovery right almost from the beginning. We have been recycling lead-acid batteries for many years now. Surely we can do it with the new technology.

Comments are below the fold.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/13/2135944/-Top-Comments-Recycling-EV-Lithium-Batteries

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