The Biggest Myth of Battery Recycling
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that only 5% of Li-ion batteries are recycled. Right? Wrong! It's already over 90%.
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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that only 5% of Li-ion batteries are recycled. Right? Wrong, in fact the figure is already over 90%
In my latest episode of Cleaning Up, I sat down with all-round battery recycling guru Hans Eric Melin. Hans Eric is one of the unsung heroes of the net-zero transition, without doubt, and it’s an eye-opening episode. Definitely one to listen to or watch!
A few takeaways for me:
The figure of 5% recycling is wrong, but it is wrong for a reason. There are two large groups of people who want to believe it, true or false and who propagate it.
People who hate the idea of electric vehicles and use any argument to impede their uptake; and
people who love the idea of electric vehicles and want to make out that there are still vast, unoccupied business opportunities.
If you want to talk about recycling of batteries or anything else, you have to be really precise in your use of language.
Collection rate - how many batteries that should’ve been collected were actually collected
Recyling rate - of those collected, how many were recycled, rather than junked or left to rot in warehouses.
Recycling efficiency - how much of the battery material gets recovered, on average, by weight.
Recovery rate - for any particular element/material - lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, graphite, etc - what percentage gets recovered.
Purity - will the material be pure enough at the end of the recycling process to use in a new application, or will it need further refining?
A lot of batteries are not recycled, either because they sit inside an old appliance or car and it’s not clear they have reached the end of life, or because the appliance or car just keeps being used even though the battery has degraded, or because the whole battery, or the module, or individual cells can be repurposed.
So we have the bizarre situation where the world thinks batteries cannot be recycled when the reality is that existing battery recycling capacity is only 25% or 30% used because batteries are not reaching their end-of-life in sufficient volumes!
Finally, Hans Eric confirmed something that I have talked about in the past: forever battery minerals. If you can recover 90% of any critical mineral in a battery on recycling, that critical mineral can continue delivering the same or more energy storage services for as long as the new battery you make at each iteration is at least 10% more energy dense than the one being recycled.
The bottom line is that far from being the achilles heel of electrification, battery recycling is the secret weapon. We can seriously imagine a world in which we have mined enough critical minerals to maintain a circular flow in the global economy.
Not for the next few decades, for sure, but eventually. That is what happens when you #StopBurningStuff!
To listen to the interview with battery guru Hans Eric Melin visit cleaningup.live, search for Cleaning Up on your podcast platform of choice, or watch the video on YouTube here.
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