I’ll naturally change my argument as new tech comes into play. I’m simply talking about today’s Li-ion cells and based on industry changes.
Today, only an estimated 1% to 5% of Li-ion batteries are recycled. Yes, recycling technology is ramping up, but it doesn’t exist yet in any practical scale. We’re basically throwing away 95% of all that filth into our landfills and wasting the metal.
The current batteries being produced will be useful for decades
These Li-ion cells are only designed for a few thousand recharge/discharge cycles. You can somewhat hamper this degeneration process by building larger batteries and spreading the recharge/discharge among more cells, but on a cell-per-cell basis, the amount of recharge/discharge cycles is basically fixed and predictable. From an evironmental point of view, the optimization is to minimize the use of cells (IE: Hybrids or PHEVs), rather than building larger vehicles and wasting the batteries even further.
But give me one Li-ion cell, and charge / discharge it 3000 times or so (or whatever its endurance is), and it will be worn out and near worthless by the end of that. (Below specs on power, storage, etc. etc.). That’s just how they work chemically, the process isn’t purely reversable. The internal chemicals get mixed up and degrade after every use. They innately have a limited lifespan.
When technology changes, I’ll talk about that. My biggest hope is not the Sodium Batteries, but Toyota’s Silicon / Solid State Batteries. (Aka: built out of Sand). The Lithium still exists (its really a Silicon/Lithium battery), but at least the Cobalt and other dirty chemicals in the anode have been removed.
These Li-ion cells are only designed for a few thousand recharge/discharge cycles.
And if a pack gives you 300 miles of range, 2,000 charge cycles equates to 600,000 miles driven off a single pack. Compare that to a standard engine and transmission with a lifespan of 150,000-300,000 miles (depending on manufacturer) and the difference is clear.
One of these things is not like the other from an environmental point of view. Multiple car engines, transmissions (etc. etc.) can be built, rebuilt, and recycled through our recycling process. Every Li-ion cell made for these EVs? I don’t think so. Li-ion recycling infrastructure today is incredibly shit. So yes, I’ll focus very much upon the mostly unrecyclable batteries and the colossal amounts of waste involved in the Li-ion chemistries.
Why do you think the current state of things today is indicative of how things will be tomorrow? Recycling lithium out of EV packs is still limited because the market is brand new. You say 90% of steel is recycled from cars but what percentage was recycled back in 1920 or 1930 when that market was just as fresh as the current EV market?
What about all the oil used to fuel these ICE engines? How much of that gets recycled? 600,000 miles at a conservative 30MPG equates to 20,000 gallons of gasoline saved from being burned up into nothing. How many Gulf oil spills or Exxon Valdez does that prevent?
Why do you think the current state of things today is indicative of how things will be tomorrow?
Mostly because constructing recycling plants is a multi-year endeavor. Unless you are aware of any Li-ion recycling plants that are opening up tomorrow, your argument is dead.
Contact me when those recycling plants are built. Oh, and spoiler alert, I’ve been following the news on that. It turns out Li-ion recycling is a very difficult chemical problem that all the researchers are having trouble with. As it turns out, the chemical composition of Li-poly vs LFP vs Li-cobalt leads to seriously complex contamination issues. Large scale recycling of Li-ion is a fantasy right now, and will continue to be a fantasy for the near future (~next 5 years or so), as these crazy difficult research problems come up. And the invention of alternative chemistries (ex: Silicon-Lithium batteries, like the type Toyota plans to produce in 2025) will only make the recycling problem harder, not easier. There’s too much chemical diversity and contamination going on.
In contrast, Steel is steel. You melt it down and bam, its ready to be reused. No worried about the Cobalt being separated out for Cobalt-Lithium batteries, or for LFP batteries to be recycled into Li + Iron, or for Li-Poly batteries to be turned back into other chemistries. Its not even clear what kind of large-scale process we need to do to separate the crazy mix of chemicals that makes up a modern EV Battery.
I do await the day when EV Battery recycling is solved. But there’s a chance we need to wait for a future chemistry (ie: something easier to recycle) before any of this crap works out. There’s some very difficult chemical questions needed to be solved before Li-ion can be recycled in a way that is profitable (like Steel or Aluminum or other materials are easily recycled).
Are you talking about Li-ion batteries in general, or car batteries?
I don’t think there are many car batteries to be recycled yet. Only the Leaf’s batteries degraded sufficiently to warrant replacement and even those seem to be used with shorter range. Tesla batteries with faults get refurbished IIUC. The ev conversion market likes to use second hand packs and prices are strong because there are too few.
I have read that recycling is feasible and realistic but did not bother to check. Can you point to the research that says it is hard and that the batreries will serve no future use as is?
Are you talking about Li-ion batteries in general, or car batteries?
I’m switching between the two depending on context. Apologies if that’s confusing. But a car battery is just thousands of the smaller, regular Li-ion batteries (18650 cells were famously used for large numbers of Tesla cars, and thsese 18650 are the same Li-ion cells used in laptops and other smaller machines). But in any case, the chemical process is 100% identical in whatever form factor the battery is. Big or small. So frankly, they’re one-and-the-same. Any facility that can handle car batteries will be a facility that can handle the recycling of regular-ol 18650 cells.
Looking up some research: Pyrometallurgy (aka: set it all on fire and seperate the metals after they’ve liquified) has high levels of success with Cobalt for example. But its terrible for recovering Lithium.
Hydrometallurgy (aka: dip it inside of acid) gets rather specific as different acids have different properties. Li-Co works well with Hydrochloric Acid. But Mn (present in some Li-ion chemistries) is lost in HCl based recycling processes. Of course, Cobalt-free mixes (such as LiFePO4) need a different acid. Etc. etc. There’s solutions and processes available for specific Li-ion chemistries, but finding something that works on everything (and cheaply, effectively, and consistently so that the Recycling plant actually makes money) is basically unsolved.
Etc. etc. There’s significant problems that haven’t been solved yet in the battery recycling question. Despite the decades of experience we have with Li-ion… it turns out that Li-ion isn’t one chemistry. Its a family of different chemistries that has incrementally changed (and competing Li-ion formulas between different companies are further complicating the process).
Again: this isn’t like Steel where Steel is Steel everywhere (aka: Iron + Carbon) and chemically similar. Li-Ion has too many different chemistries, too much competition, and too much change from year-to-year for recycling to have taken off. Even today we’re seeing a switch from Li-Co chemistries into LiFePO4 chemistries, who knows what the future will bring? Its not worth it to build million-dollar plants to recycle batteries (aka: Obtain a few penny’s worth of Li or Co) when we can’t even settle upon a set chemistry or chemical composition.
I have read that recycling is feasible and realistic but did not bother to check. Can you point to the research that says it is hard and that the batreries will serve no future use as is?
The theories exist. There’s a chemical formula for everything.
The issue is doing it at scale, at low cost, at good enough recovery, at good enough consistencies, to make money and actually be worthy of investor $$$$.
Oh right, and here come Sodium and Silicon batteries. Weeeeee! Isn’t this fun? Back to square 1 and researching the new sets of acids needed to handle THOSE chemistries…
You don’t have to do any of that to repurpose the batteries.
If the car is junked due to a wreck or other failure unrelated to the battery, grab the cells out if it and use them for something else. Eventually, the car body and the battery will be worth more as separate components, the car body will be recycled for the steel and aluminum, and the battery will be repurposed. It’s not complicated.
You know that each charge/discharge cycle irreversibly destroys the chemistry of Li-ion right? Li-ion as a technology wears out every time you recharge.
The chemical cell is a replacable part that must be regularly manufactured. Its near worthless after ~3000 cycles or so given today’s chemical compositions. Hopefully future improvements to recycling, cycles, durability, etc. etc. can make this number better. But the ~3000ish cycle limit is innate to today’s chemistries.
The exact number depends on temperature, charging characteristics (faster charge causes more wear-and-tear internally, slower-charge is better but slower/less convenient), and a myriad of factors. These are things that ultimately are thrown away as they become useless / worn out. The only way to break this cycle is to grind up the battery, dissolve the useful chemicals into acid, split out the metals into purified parts, and then rebuild the battery from scratch.
If a car gets into an accident and its cells are still within their usable lifetime, maybe you can repurpose the batteries. But its not clear how you’re supposed to track the durability / wear-out factor of those cells. Recycling them entirely back into fresh and purified chemical compounds for greatest consistency would be the best solution (as is done currently for Lead-acid batteries at 99%+ recycling rates). The issue is that Li-ion chemistries for recycling haven’t been fully figured out from a profitability perspective yet, so no such large scale plants exist.
With that explanation I am still not clear whether the statistic on percentage of recycled batteries was car batteries, the battery industry as a whole, li-ion batteries, rechargeable batteries, … I am honestly interested in which statistics you are referring to. Especially the evolution of recycling of car batteries and the regions where recycling and collection occurs.
It seems you are adding uncertainty and doubt on the topic of battery recycling which I’m not sure is grounded. We are well past the point in our environment where we can live our current lifestyle in the way we live it today. We have to adapt to a different lifestyle and make strategic bets. It seems clear that we should stop pumping up oil and electric cars may help there. I’m looking for research that indicates that current car batteries are waiting in stockpiles to be recycled but no plants exist to recycle them.
As far as I can tell, there are not even enough bad battery packs around to suit the diy hackers to reuse them for home energy storage and with some luck your research points me to where I can find them.
I can grab any Li-ion chemistry I want from Digikey and use it for experiments at home.
I’m actually a hobby electrical engineer and moderator of /c/ece here and like to discuss electrical engineering.
Batteries are more of a chemical engineering thing, but experiments are conducted with electrical inventions (opamps, microcontrollers, pcbs).
In any case, Digikey.com has plenty of batteries. But used batteries are risky, especially with how explosive Li-ion is.
IMO, Hobbyists shouldn’t be experimenting with Li-ion (or unprotected Li-ion) without substantial fire safety measures. It’s a well known explosive risk in our field.
But if you really want to experiment, buy a fire extinguisher and the old ‘Bucket of Sand’ trick. Keep watch over the batteries during your experiments, keep flammable objects away, leave the battery test inside the bucket of sand and keep the fire extinguisher closeby.
I’ll naturally change my argument as new tech comes into play. I’m simply talking about today’s Li-ion cells and based on industry changes.
Today, only an estimated 1% to 5% of Li-ion batteries are recycled. Yes, recycling technology is ramping up, but it doesn’t exist yet in any practical scale. We’re basically throwing away 95% of all that filth into our landfills and wasting the metal.
These Li-ion cells are only designed for a few thousand recharge/discharge cycles. You can somewhat hamper this degeneration process by building larger batteries and spreading the recharge/discharge among more cells, but on a cell-per-cell basis, the amount of recharge/discharge cycles is basically fixed and predictable. From an evironmental point of view, the optimization is to minimize the use of cells (IE: Hybrids or PHEVs), rather than building larger vehicles and wasting the batteries even further.
But give me one Li-ion cell, and charge / discharge it 3000 times or so (or whatever its endurance is), and it will be worn out and near worthless by the end of that. (Below specs on power, storage, etc. etc.). That’s just how they work chemically, the process isn’t purely reversable. The internal chemicals get mixed up and degrade after every use. They innately have a limited lifespan.
When technology changes, I’ll talk about that. My biggest hope is not the Sodium Batteries, but Toyota’s Silicon / Solid State Batteries. (Aka: built out of Sand). The Lithium still exists (its really a Silicon/Lithium battery), but at least the Cobalt and other dirty chemicals in the anode have been removed.
And if a pack gives you 300 miles of range, 2,000 charge cycles equates to 600,000 miles driven off a single pack. Compare that to a standard engine and transmission with a lifespan of 150,000-300,000 miles (depending on manufacturer) and the difference is clear.
90% of steel from cars is recycled.
Less than 5% of Li-ion batteries are recycled.
One of these things is not like the other from an environmental point of view. Multiple car engines, transmissions (etc. etc.) can be built, rebuilt, and recycled through our recycling process. Every Li-ion cell made for these EVs? I don’t think so. Li-ion recycling infrastructure today is incredibly shit. So yes, I’ll focus very much upon the mostly unrecyclable batteries and the colossal amounts of waste involved in the Li-ion chemistries.
Why do you think the current state of things today is indicative of how things will be tomorrow? Recycling lithium out of EV packs is still limited because the market is brand new. You say 90% of steel is recycled from cars but what percentage was recycled back in 1920 or 1930 when that market was just as fresh as the current EV market?
What about all the oil used to fuel these ICE engines? How much of that gets recycled? 600,000 miles at a conservative 30MPG equates to 20,000 gallons of gasoline saved from being burned up into nothing. How many Gulf oil spills or Exxon Valdez does that prevent?
Mostly because constructing recycling plants is a multi-year endeavor. Unless you are aware of any Li-ion recycling plants that are opening up tomorrow, your argument is dead.
Contact me when those recycling plants are built. Oh, and spoiler alert, I’ve been following the news on that. It turns out Li-ion recycling is a very difficult chemical problem that all the researchers are having trouble with. As it turns out, the chemical composition of Li-poly vs LFP vs Li-cobalt leads to seriously complex contamination issues. Large scale recycling of Li-ion is a fantasy right now, and will continue to be a fantasy for the near future (~next 5 years or so), as these crazy difficult research problems come up. And the invention of alternative chemistries (ex: Silicon-Lithium batteries, like the type Toyota plans to produce in 2025) will only make the recycling problem harder, not easier. There’s too much chemical diversity and contamination going on.
In contrast, Steel is steel. You melt it down and bam, its ready to be reused. No worried about the Cobalt being separated out for Cobalt-Lithium batteries, or for LFP batteries to be recycled into Li + Iron, or for Li-Poly batteries to be turned back into other chemistries. Its not even clear what kind of large-scale process we need to do to separate the crazy mix of chemicals that makes up a modern EV Battery.
I do await the day when EV Battery recycling is solved. But there’s a chance we need to wait for a future chemistry (ie: something easier to recycle) before any of this crap works out. There’s some very difficult chemical questions needed to be solved before Li-ion can be recycled in a way that is profitable (like Steel or Aluminum or other materials are easily recycled).
Are you talking about Li-ion batteries in general, or car batteries?
I don’t think there are many car batteries to be recycled yet. Only the Leaf’s batteries degraded sufficiently to warrant replacement and even those seem to be used with shorter range. Tesla batteries with faults get refurbished IIUC. The ev conversion market likes to use second hand packs and prices are strong because there are too few.
I have read that recycling is feasible and realistic but did not bother to check. Can you point to the research that says it is hard and that the batreries will serve no future use as is?
I’m switching between the two depending on context. Apologies if that’s confusing. But a car battery is just thousands of the smaller, regular Li-ion batteries (18650 cells were famously used for large numbers of Tesla cars, and thsese 18650 are the same Li-ion cells used in laptops and other smaller machines). But in any case, the chemical process is 100% identical in whatever form factor the battery is. Big or small. So frankly, they’re one-and-the-same. Any facility that can handle car batteries will be a facility that can handle the recycling of regular-ol 18650 cells.
Looking up some research: Pyrometallurgy (aka: set it all on fire and seperate the metals after they’ve liquified) has high levels of success with Cobalt for example. But its terrible for recovering Lithium.
Hydrometallurgy (aka: dip it inside of acid) gets rather specific as different acids have different properties. Li-Co works well with Hydrochloric Acid. But Mn (present in some Li-ion chemistries) is lost in HCl based recycling processes. Of course, Cobalt-free mixes (such as LiFePO4) need a different acid. Etc. etc. There’s solutions and processes available for specific Li-ion chemistries, but finding something that works on everything (and cheaply, effectively, and consistently so that the Recycling plant actually makes money) is basically unsolved.
Etc. etc. There’s significant problems that haven’t been solved yet in the battery recycling question. Despite the decades of experience we have with Li-ion… it turns out that Li-ion isn’t one chemistry. Its a family of different chemistries that has incrementally changed (and competing Li-ion formulas between different companies are further complicating the process).
Again: this isn’t like Steel where Steel is Steel everywhere (aka: Iron + Carbon) and chemically similar. Li-Ion has too many different chemistries, too much competition, and too much change from year-to-year for recycling to have taken off. Even today we’re seeing a switch from Li-Co chemistries into LiFePO4 chemistries, who knows what the future will bring? Its not worth it to build million-dollar plants to recycle batteries (aka: Obtain a few penny’s worth of Li or Co) when we can’t even settle upon a set chemistry or chemical composition.
The theories exist. There’s a chemical formula for everything.
The issue is doing it at scale, at low cost, at good enough recovery, at good enough consistencies, to make money and actually be worthy of investor $$$$.
Oh right, and here come Sodium and Silicon batteries. Weeeeee! Isn’t this fun? Back to square 1 and researching the new sets of acids needed to handle THOSE chemistries…
You don’t have to do any of that to repurpose the batteries.
If the car is junked due to a wreck or other failure unrelated to the battery, grab the cells out if it and use them for something else. Eventually, the car body and the battery will be worth more as separate components, the car body will be recycled for the steel and aluminum, and the battery will be repurposed. It’s not complicated.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-021-00954-3
You know that each charge/discharge cycle irreversibly destroys the chemistry of Li-ion right? Li-ion as a technology wears out every time you recharge.
The chemical cell is a replacable part that must be regularly manufactured. Its near worthless after ~3000 cycles or so given today’s chemical compositions. Hopefully future improvements to recycling, cycles, durability, etc. etc. can make this number better. But the ~3000ish cycle limit is innate to today’s chemistries.
The exact number depends on temperature, charging characteristics (faster charge causes more wear-and-tear internally, slower-charge is better but slower/less convenient), and a myriad of factors. These are things that ultimately are thrown away as they become useless / worn out. The only way to break this cycle is to grind up the battery, dissolve the useful chemicals into acid, split out the metals into purified parts, and then rebuild the battery from scratch.
If a car gets into an accident and its cells are still within their usable lifetime, maybe you can repurpose the batteries. But its not clear how you’re supposed to track the durability / wear-out factor of those cells. Recycling them entirely back into fresh and purified chemical compounds for greatest consistency would be the best solution (as is done currently for Lead-acid batteries at 99%+ recycling rates). The issue is that Li-ion chemistries for recycling haven’t been fully figured out from a profitability perspective yet, so no such large scale plants exist.
With that explanation I am still not clear whether the statistic on percentage of recycled batteries was car batteries, the battery industry as a whole, li-ion batteries, rechargeable batteries, … I am honestly interested in which statistics you are referring to. Especially the evolution of recycling of car batteries and the regions where recycling and collection occurs.
It seems you are adding uncertainty and doubt on the topic of battery recycling which I’m not sure is grounded. We are well past the point in our environment where we can live our current lifestyle in the way we live it today. We have to adapt to a different lifestyle and make strategic bets. It seems clear that we should stop pumping up oil and electric cars may help there. I’m looking for research that indicates that current car batteries are waiting in stockpiles to be recycled but no plants exist to recycle them.
As far as I can tell, there are not even enough bad battery packs around to suit the diy hackers to reuse them for home energy storage and with some luck your research points me to where I can find them.
I can grab any Li-ion chemistry I want from Digikey and use it for experiments at home.
I’m actually a hobby electrical engineer and moderator of /c/ece here and like to discuss electrical engineering.
Batteries are more of a chemical engineering thing, but experiments are conducted with electrical inventions (opamps, microcontrollers, pcbs).
In any case, Digikey.com has plenty of batteries. But used batteries are risky, especially with how explosive Li-ion is.
IMO, Hobbyists shouldn’t be experimenting with Li-ion (or unprotected Li-ion) without substantial fire safety measures. It’s a well known explosive risk in our field.
But if you really want to experiment, buy a fire extinguisher and the old ‘Bucket of Sand’ trick. Keep watch over the batteries during your experiments, keep flammable objects away, leave the battery test inside the bucket of sand and keep the fire extinguisher closeby.