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The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

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Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

#21

Post by h0l0cube »

1053r wrote: post #10
artvark11 wrote: post #4

The lie that electric vehicles are better for the environment than internal combustion needs to stop. Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit impoverished counties and extract their lithium reserves while destroying their environments. We will not clean up when we finish. Lithium batteries will pollute our water supplies here at home when they aren't properly disposed. This is a giant environmental…

The parent comment is a pack of memes straight out of a propaganda machine. https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/new-data-show-electri... Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it, but that energy is increasingly sourced by clean energy sources. Let me cite the oil company, BP. https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat... Coal is in terminal…

> Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it

... and human labor, and other chemicals. I'm not sure if you read the article, but it claims that recycling is still a somewhat tenuous economic proposition vs digging more out of the ground. This is especially true given the glut of lithium, while cobalt and other rare minerals are slowly being phased out of battery designs.

Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

#22

Post by jeffreyrogers »

1053r wrote: post #10
artvark11 wrote: post #4

The lie that electric vehicles are better for the environment than internal combustion needs to stop. Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit impoverished counties and extract their lithium reserves while destroying their environments. We will not clean up when we finish. Lithium batteries will pollute our water supplies here at home when they aren't properly disposed. This is a giant environmental…

The parent comment is a pack of memes straight out of a propaganda machine. https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/new-data-show-electri... Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it, but that energy is increasingly sourced by clean energy sources. Let me cite the oil company, BP. https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat... Coal is in terminal…

> Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it

It's not at all obvious to me that recycling is easy/practical. E.g. recycling the alloy from alloy steel is not done because it is too costly to separate. I'm not sure why batteries would be much different.

Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

#23

Post by jacobr1 »

mattashii wrote: post #13
artvark11 wrote: post #4

The lie that electric vehicles are better for the environment than internal combustion needs to stop. Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit impoverished counties and extract their lithium reserves while destroying their environments. We will not clean up when we finish. Lithium batteries will pollute our water supplies here at home when they aren't properly disposed. This is a giant environmental…

> Otherwise our electric cars will be running on coal. With modern coal plants, that isn't _too_ bad actually. Modern coal plants reach 46% efficiency[0], compared to the 30-35% for modern passenger cars (older cars = less efficient). This is a 30-50% [1] efficiency gain, while also emitting 30-45% more CO2 for the same amount of energy released (gasoline vs bituminous coal and anthracite, for diesel it's 25-40%). So…

Also consider industrial carbon capture. It would be costly, but it seems it would easier to capture carbon emissions at the primary coal burning sites than with distributed burners. We still should be looking at non-coal, renewable options and I'm glad we are, but we still have a lot of milage with "cleaner" fossil-fuel based approaches. This IPCC Report[0] suggests 80%+ CO2 sequestration rates extrapolated from known technologies (built on smaller scales).

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100210022620/http://www1.ipcc....

Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

#24

Post by tonyedgecombe »

jrockway wrote: post #7
artvark11 wrote: post #4

The lie that electric vehicles are better for the environment than internal combustion needs to stop. Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit impoverished counties and extract their lithium reserves while destroying their environments. We will not clean up when we finish. Lithium batteries will pollute our water supplies here at home when they aren't properly disposed. This is a giant environmental…

What's your plan for moving around when our limited supply of fossil fuels are depleted?

Not the OP but civilisation didn't start with the invention of the motor car. If you look at our general wellbeing it hasn't shifted one iota over the period that cars become pervasive.

Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

#25

Post by d33lio »

Tesla seems to have used the same dirty trick used by oil companies to convince the public that plastics were largely "recyclable" by conflating economically productive (for Tesla) re-use of decommissioned batteries from Teslas and "recycling" of actual cells. I support the work of Elon Musk, obviously many here do not and call him a fraud, however I do take issue with how he uses this line to call the battery tech Tesla uses "renewable".

Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

#26

Post by Chris2048 »

vlovich123 wrote: post #9
artvark11 wrote: post #4

The lie that electric vehicles are better for the environment than internal combustion needs to stop. Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit impoverished counties and extract their lithium reserves while destroying their environments. We will not clean up when we finish. Lithium batteries will pollute our water supplies here at home when they aren't properly disposed. This is a giant environmental…

I'm not sure that's an accurate assessment. 1. Reduced dependency on oil = less money in oil = less money for a lot of countries that historically act quite poorly on the world stage. 2. 100% better for global warming than combustion cars. 3. Is mining lithium & disposing on lithium batteries incorrectly worse for the environment than oil manufacturing, production & transport? I don't know 100% but the massive oil sp…

Are lithium batteries ever used at grid-scale?

I though the point was that the high energy-density was convenient for mobility, but poor on most other metrics, including manufacturing complexity, stability, and safety.

Grid-scale wouldn't need to care so much about energy density versus stability and maintenance, in which case lead-acid, or compressed-gas storage should shine.

Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

#27

Post by Accujack »

djsumdog wrote: post #20
1053r wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent comment is a pack of memes straight out of a propaganda machine. https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/new-data-show-electri... Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it, but that energy is increasingly sourced by clean energy sources. Let me cite the oil company, BP. https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat... Coal is in terminal…

> Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource The article goes into why this is incredibly difficult. The vast majority of lithium batteries are in landfills, compressed between all our other garbage because maybe 2% of people on the planet properly dispose of e-waste. As far as clean energy, have you watched Planet of the Humans (2020)? I want to say, I despise Michael Moore emotional bullshit, but despite his infl…

You're ignoring current SMR technology in nuclear.

Old style giant, expensive nuclear power plants are a non starter, but small modular reactors have a lot of promise, are zero emissions once running, and can be built using green energy in factories instead of constructed on site.

Fission power plants are pretty much the only way to go fully "green"... renewables are great and have a big place in the future, but unless humanity wants to drastically change their consumption of technologies and products requiring large amounts of energy for production (like Aluminum), they don't provide power in the right amounts and time spans.

Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

#28

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #22
1053r wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent comment is a pack of memes straight out of a propaganda machine. https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/new-data-show-electri... Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it, but that energy is increasingly sourced by clean energy sources. Let me cite the oil company, BP. https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat... Coal is in terminal…

> Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it It's not at all obvious to me that recycling is easy/practical. E.g. recycling the alloy from alloy steel is not done because it is too costly to separate. I'm not sure why batteries would be much different.

> It's not at all obvious to me that recycling is easy/practical.

It’s not. Other poster is just ignoring reality that it’s currently cheaper to use new lithium than to recover it.

Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

#29

Post by toomuchtodo »

d33lio wrote: post #25

Tesla seems to have used the same dirty trick used by oil companies to convince the public that plastics were largely "recyclable" by conflating economically productive (for Tesla) re-use of decommissioned batteries from Teslas and "recycling" of actual cells. I support the work of Elon Musk, obviously many here do not and call him a fraud, however I do take issue with how he uses this line to call the battery tech T…

Tesla's previous CTO and Co-founder, JB Straubel (who spent 15 years at Tesla), left to found Redwood Materials [1] (which intends to scale up battery recycling processes).

Fortum, a Finnish clean energy firm (correction provided by @Sharlin), has reached an 80% recycling rate as of 2019 [2].

It's always going to be cheaper to pour end of life cells into a remanufacturing process than to extract raw lithium from brine ponds, so it makes economic sense to do the R&D to do so. It's also going to be cheaper to reuse existing, functioning cell modules (such as folks harvesting cell packs from Teslas and other EVs for stationary storage) than to landfill or recycle those materials.

Batteries are mostly recyclable currently, full stop, although there is work required to make them 100% recyclable.

[1] https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/

[2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/03/25/innovation-boosts-lit...

Re: The Race to Crack Lithium Ion Recycling

#30

Post by bryanlarsen »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #19
bryanlarsen wrote: post #2

AFAICT, used Tesla battery packs fetch a decent price on ebay etc. They're more valuable for reuse than they are for recycling. Reuse is better than recycling.

> Reuse is better than recycling. True and I agree, however batteries have a limited lifetime, and at the end of said lifetime, lithium batteries become dangerous. Does anyone risk putting a secondhand battery in their phones for example? Might be okay for old Nokia style batteries, but the integrated ones, not a chance. Another problem is that with EV battery packs, they're not really viable to be disassembled and r…

> they're not really viable to be disassembled and repaired

The fact that you can sell a dead EV battery pack for good money indicates that it is viable.

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