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FEATURE: RECYCLING

“It’s a bit opaque exactly what is going on,
and it’s not clear whether they are getting it to Right now you’ve got cobalt driving the recycling
work efficiently enough so that the value out process in the plants where it is happening, because
of the back end is high enough that you will
be able to eliminate the necessary tipping fee,” it’s profitable. – Linda Gaines
he says. “There is a lot of cathode-to-cathode
recycling out there, it may have been done at
a lab scale, at some pilot scale, but we’re still
in the early stages of figuring out which is the
most effective.
“I believe most of the recycling going on is
the consumer batteries, and I sense that’s what
Brunp and so on is doing. No one really has
auto batteries yet in such quantities that they
know what to do with them.
“But the clock is ticking. We’re so early in
the EV age that we don’t know what the true
life cycle is going to be — it varies tremen-
dously, depending on how often they’ve been
used and cycled, and where. So there’s a whole
bunch of variables to which there will be a
mathematical answer in time — but in the RSR Technologies is also working with the
meantime, the clock is ticking.” ReCell Center. President Tim Ellis says the
Realizing this, the US DoE has offered a company has been researching the recycling of
$5.5million ‘Battery Recycling Prize’ to in- lithium batteries for 10 years.
centivize businesses to develop a process that “We have a lot of technology that allows us
can profitably capture 90% of all discarded or to reclaim the elements, we just can’t figure
spent lithium batteries in the US. out the economics of it,” he says. “It’s part of
It has also donated $15 million over three our normal technical development; we are the
years to the Argonne National Laboratory, largest recycler of lead batteries in the west-
which is working with a consortium of com- ern world but we don’t see ourselves as a lead
panies and research institutes – including Oak company, we’re an electrochemical cell recy-
Ridge National Laboratory, Worchester Poly- cling company. We’re in lead because it’s the
technic Institute and the University of Califor- biggest volume. But we believe all the chem-
nia — to set up a ReCell Center to develop a istries will show up and one thing it seems
pre-commercial prototype for the industry to the world agrees on is that digging mines and
take and scale up by the end of that period. holes in the ground to make batteries and then
Linda Gaines is systems analyst at the ANL, throw them in a landfill is a bad thing.
and chief scientist with the ReCell Center. “The DoE is very honest because it’s not
One of her principal research tasks is looking wedded to anyone’s business plan. There is a
at extricating the cathode structure in its en- lot of hype in recycling batteries but some of
tirety rather than separating its constituents – these guys are just interested in flipping a ven-
a technology that is being tried elsewhere but ture start-up, they’re not interested in build-
has yet to achieve results that prove it could ing a business. And there’s a lot of interest in
be profitable. second use because it’s not obvious that mate-
“None of the materials in the battery makes rial reclamation from the lithium battery is an
up the lion’s share of the mass and you have to obvious path like it is for lead.
separate them from each other, which isn’t so
easy because there isn’t one that’s a lot heav- 2,500,000
ier than everything else,” she says. “And right
now you’ve got cobalt driving the recycling
process in the plants where it is happening, 1,875,000
because it’s profitable.
“But one of the areas the DoE is concentrat-
ing on is how to make batteries with less and 1,250,000
even no cobalt — which is good in that we
wouldn’t be dependent on importing it, but
bad because it means at the end-of-life there’s
less to recover, reducing the materials of value 625,000
to get out of the process.
“This is what makes the structure of the
cathode a valuable commodity to recover. 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
Even if you have less valuable elements, if you
put them into a structure that’s valuable and Placed on the market End-of-life Available for recycling
can recover that structure, you have the pos-
sibility of having an economical process.” EV batteries POM, EOL, recycling (tonnes global) Source: Global Battery Alliance

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