The huge potential of battery recycling

Let's talk about battery recycling. It's true that producing EVs typically generates a larger amount of CO2 than traditional I.C.E vehicles due to the methods and ingredients required for the battery packs. This has lead to a bad reputation since they have a greater environmental impact by the time they're delivered to a customer, but as they create no emissions from then on, the only additional source of pollution may be attributed to the energy used to recharge them. For people who have the funds and ability to install solar panels and battery storage at their home, their transport impact can be essentially zero and will soon reach the crossover point of becoming carbon neutral (parity with I.C.E.). Only then are they truly 'green' and infinitely more environmentally friendly than combustion, which continually does more and more damage the longer it's kept on the road.

In a perfect world everybody would have access to clean, renewable, (and ideally for the wallet) self-generated energy. Until then, whilst the globe makes an increasingly rapid transition, we in the UK at least have the option to switch to reputable suppliers such as Octopus Energy or Ecotricity that provide 100% of their supply from clean sources, but it's clear we all still have a long way to go in terms of energy generation.

With regards to storage production however, a great way to circumvent the initial impact and cost is by simply re-using old battery packs. Granted there are currently precious-few available from retired vehicles as they simply haven't been around for long enough yet, but after about a decade of charging cycles or many hundreds of thousand of miles driven, those older packs start to degrade and reach the end of their useful life for a car or truck. Luckily their lifecycle is far from over and they can be relatively easily disassembled and rebuilt into stationary storage like Powerwalls or Megapacks which have much lower energy demands, so they may usefully live on for further decades.

Redivivus

Ascend Elements

Alternatively, technology exists to safely crush old batteries and use fluid separation chemistry to retrieve almost all of the constituent parts with an efficiency greater than 90%, leaving a clean pile of raw materials ready to be fed straight back into the production of new cells at a fraction of the cost and carbon footprint. Of course the current demand for cells and their base components is already high and demand is expected to increase by 500% by 2030 as mass electrification ensues, so being able to farm this additional supply lowers the pressure on newly mined minerals and simply increases the worldwide storage capacity - the pot that grows ever more full and really embodies the ‘three-R’ ethos - Reduce, Reuse & Recycle.

Redwood Materials

In 2017 Tesla co-founder and CTO J.B. Straubel saw the upcoming potential and necessity for a circular supply chain of Lithium-ion batteries and branched out on their own to create Redwood Materials, an enterprise dedicated to increase the supply of battery materials and reduce their environmental impact and cost. Many other companies are springing up for the same purpose and all are equally keen to achieve the same goal; Redivivus, Ascend Elements and of course Tesla themselves (despite so far seeing a shortage of second-hand packs to recycle) are getting ready for the imminent, massive influx of old batteries in the coming years. They're all fully committed and heavily investing into this necessary technology and with all of the momentum and research in the sector, it may not be long before even a brand new EV comes at a mere fraction of today's carbon output, being the final nail in the coffin of any argument that they're not effective at transitioning the world to a sustainable future.

In parallel with this, breakthroughs in chemistry from major players like Samsung and CATL, as well as entrepreneurial start-ups like Polar Night Energy (batteries using sand) and Ambri (liquid metal batteries) are unlocking possibilities to create energy storage from even more abundant, readily-accessible and most importantly, recyclable materials that also increase efficacy and safety. Finally this 100 year-old concept is getting a long-awaited 21st century overhaul!