Why It's So Hard To Recycle Electric-Car Batteries | World Wide Waste

this is called black mass it's made of rare metals recycled from lithium-ion batteries that kind of power most smartphones laptops and electric cars less than half of these ever get recycled electric cars are supposed to help the planet but could their batteries create the next trash problem and why are those batteries so difficult to recycle the batteries from traditional gas-powered cars called lead acid batteries are made mostly of well lead and they're highly toxic if they end up in a landfill but in the u.s strict laws in most states mean that almost 100 percent of them get recycled most electric cars on the other hand use lithium-ion batteries they're not nearly as toxic as lead acid batteries but they're much bigger and sometimes lithium-ion batteries explode a lot of companies have shied away typically from handling the material because of that core safety challenge lifecycle's founders started the company in 2016 to find a safer way to deal with this waste stream and to capitalize on a growing market we saw recycling as the glaring hole in the supply chain only about five percent of cars sold globally in 2020 were electric and these batteries will last about 10 years by that time there could be almost 100 eiffel towers worth of used-up lithium-ion batteries to recycle many people think isn't recycling just needed like 10 years from now and the problem is already here in the form of leftover scrap and rejects from battery factories there is a tsunami coming at us and the process is the same one used to recycle smaller batteries from phones and laptops one of the first steps is dumping the batteries onto tables to shake off a flame packing material called vermiculite we'll tip it up onto the first screen and we'll remove that vermiculite material before it goes on to our first speed conveyor companies make batteries in different ways but the founders say they found one recycling method that can handle them all and they can process large electric car batteries with almost no disassembly other groups will typically dismantle manually to get to a cell level at that sort of scale of a pack you have potentially thousands of cells instead of that this system slices lithium-ion batteries into confetti-like shreds because these batteries can catch on fire under pressure you can't just throw them into any old shredder when you crush a lith my battery standard device it short circuits and that short circuiting is what can drive a thermal event aka fire so how does lifecycle shred the batteries without blowing them up the founders keep some of the details secret but a key part is the liquid that's hidden inside this shredding system there's no oxygen there without oxygen there's no fires that liquid also helps separate the plastic which most recyclers just burn away as the batteries are being broken up the low density plastic is floating up to the top we separate it out we bag it ready for our customers lifecycle plans to have this plastic recycled at some point but wouldn't tell us where it currently goes machines separate what's left in the system into two categories metallic foil and black mass so behind me we're bagging that metallic foil and we sell this for the copper content as well as the precious metals the most valuable metals are in the black mass black mass contains the nickel the cobalt manganese graphite lithium etc experts say that if current trends continue the world could run low on battery metals like nickel and manganese in less than a decade one metric ton of black mass the amount in each of these bags is worth about 3 500 chemical treatments can separate the rare metals out of it but life cycle's chemical facilities aren't up and running yet so for now it has to ship the black mass to a smelter smelting uses chemicals and extremely high temperatures to purify metals it requires a lot of energy and creates pollution this method gets nickel and cobalt from the black mass but the rest of it goes to waste they can't recover the lithium they can't recover the graphite so there's a lot of value that's left behind lifecycle's not alone most lithium-ion battery recyclers don't recover lithium but the founders say they're building another plant next to this one that will recover everything this could reduce the need for mining which contributes to global warming contaminates soil and can involve unethical labor practices once the company is recovering all the metals for every ton of batteries recycled the founders say they will avoid five tons of co2 emissions that would have come from mining new metals and they say recycled metals are cheaper than mined ones too this could lower the cost of electric cars which experts say is a good thing because even though the batteries take a toll on the environment electric cars are still better for the planet than traditional ones evs are much more efficient than they were five ten years ago it's better for the environment from a greenhouse gas perspective than driving an internal combustion engine car because we've seen all these performance improvements both at the vehicle level and in our electricity grid right now lifecycle processes about 10 000 tons of batteries per year it's roughly equivalent to about 30 000 electric vehicle equivalent per year that's a fraction of the projected 550 million electric cars on the road by 2040 but it has plans to scale up and build more recycling plants like this one right next to factories that make batteries when you scale that across the global application it really allows for lithium-ion batteries to support this transition into a more sustainable future [Music] you

Channel: Business Insider India

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Keywords: business insider, business insider india, unbiased, viral, battery recycling, electric car, electric vehicle, car battery, battery recycling business, world wide waste, battery recycling process, battery recycling factory, electric cars 2021, electric car in india, electric car conversion, electric car motor

Id: dyDoOcBMAHw

Length: 6min 16sec (376 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021