World Takes Baby Steps Towards A Lithium-Ion Recycling Infrastructure
As much as I love the coming onslaught of electric cars, they use lots of materials that currently have almost no recycling infrastructure — especially when it comes to their batteries. The numbers vary by the type of lithium-ion battery used, but on average, for every 100 miles of pure-electric range, a lithium-ion battery needs to contain about 15 pounds of lithium.
Although the developed world has had robust systems in place for a long time to deal with the recycling of lead-acid batteries (in the U.S. more than 95% of battery lead gets recycled), the lithium-ion battery has a long way to go to catch up. Granted, lithium-ion batteries are not nearly as toxic as lead-acid batteries and so the urgency of developing a recycling infrastructure is virtually non-existent. In fact, lithium-ion batteries are classified by the U.S. government as non-toxic and “safe” to throw away in the regular trash.
- » See also: Leo Motors CEO Dr. Robert Kang on the Future of Electric Vehicles
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But from my perspective, throwing away something that contains lots of metals and is a finite resource just doesn’t make any sense. And even if the government says it’s non-toxic, there’s always the potential for large amounts of battery waste to leach metals into our water supply — and that’s never a good thing.
There is one major sticking point, however: The biggest barrier to recycling lithium-ion batteries is that raw mined lithium carbonate has historically had a relatively low market price — from 2001-2005 it had a pretty consistent value of about $1.50 per kilogram. At that level, recycling lithium-ion batteries becomes a money-losing venture. But from 2005-2007, the market value of lithium carbonate rose dramatically to around $3.50 per kilogram along with rising demand.
The market value of lithium is sure to rise higher as electric-drive vehicles take more and more market share. Even so, at the current $3.50 per kilogram, making lithium-ion battery recycling profitable is difficult. Just doing back of the napkin calculations: if each car battery has about 7 kg of lithium, the lithium recycling process, including overhead and personnel, would have to cost less than $24.50 per car battery to make it a profitable venture. Granted, that’s for lithium only, and lithium-ion car batteries certainly contain more recyclable materials than just lithium, but for comparison purposes you start to see the problem clearly.
Lithium-ion batteries account for only 25% of worldwide demand for lithium, but that percentage has risen quickly over the last decade. We don’t currently have a shortage of the stuff and, according to research at Argonne National Lab, the total reserves of lithium on Earth could meet lithium demand through 2050 without any recycling infrastructure — that’s even with an optimistic view of how quickly electric cars and plug-in hybrids capture market share. 2050 may seem like a long way away, but in that time around 10 million tonnes of lithium, give or take, will have been thrown away. Clearly, taking steps now to develop a recycling infrastructure seems like the wise thing to do.
So, along those lines, both the U.S. and Europe have recently awarded relatively small amounts of research funds to a *handful* of lithium-ion battery recyclers to expand current capabilities and/or set up pilot projects. In the U.S., TOXCO was given $9.5 million in stimulus funds to research hydrothermal recycling of lithium-ion batteries. TOXCO has the only facility in North America that can handle all types of lithium-ion batteries. In Europe, Chemetall Lithium was just given €5.7 million ($8.4 million) by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, to build a pilot plant for the recycling of large format lithium-ion batteries.
While these are important steps in the right direction, the infrastructure to handle the onslaught of electric cars seems to be lagging quite a bit behind the actual onslaught of electric cars.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. Used under a GNU Free Documentation License.
This might be a dumb suggestion, but why not just store the batteries and recylce them when the price of lithium is higher? Find an old abandoned mine somewhere and dump all the used lithium-ion batteries there. Then in 50 years, when it makes economic sense, set up a recylcing plant next to the mine and “mine” the lithium.
Well I was going to say not a bad idea but then..
I thought the utilities wanted those batteries after they reached about 90% capacity point for grid load balancing. That way they have already reached a centralized area and the responsibility passes onto the utility after they have worn them down further.
Failing that if we refuse to allow dumping, then a recycle charge must be added (like with microwave ovens etc) to underwrite the costs of recycling.
In other words there is a lot more cradle to grave thinking that needs to be done. Also lithium batteries are still in their very early stages of development and will evolve fairly quickly.