Can EV Batteries Be Recycled?
Batteries are the biggest and most expensive component of electric cars, and they are packed with expensive, hard-to-source materials like lithium, cobalt, and manganese. The cost of their materials – and the cost to produce them – make batteries precious, even when the vehicles they are installed in reach the end of their lives. After many years of faithful service, or a collision, what happens to EV batteries?
Many can be repurposed as a non-EV battery for energy storage, like Tesla’s PowerWall product, or Porsche’s on-site power plant in Leipzig. But, much like the batteries in your used-up laptops or cell phones (which contain many of the same materials), EV batteries can also be recycled – ensuring those precious materials don’t end up in landfills, but are instead fed back into the supply chain, helping to create a circular lifecycle for them.
Recycling Lithium-Ion Batteries
Redwood Materials, a battery-recycling company founded by a former Tesla chief technology officer, is one of the leaders in the battery-recycling space, and is working to ensure that the lithium, cobalt, nickel, and other precious materials in EV batteries are effectively recycled.
End-of-life EV batteries are received at one of the company’s two campuses in Reno, Nevada and Charleston, South Carolina, where they are dismantled, shredded, and sorted into what’s called “black mass” – a stack of valuable metal shreds from the batteries that is ready to be processed.
The company then uses two processes – pyrometallurgy, sometimes shortened to “pyro,” and hydrometallurgy, or “hydro.” Pyrometallurgy superheats the metals to around 1,500 degrees Celsius, burning off graphite and solvents and separating cobalt, copper and nickel. Hydrometallurgy operates at lower temperatures and can efficiently recover lithium.
Redwood says that its recycling processes have a much smaller environmental impact than other mining or recycling technologies – reducing energy consumption by about 80 percent, lowering CO2 emissions by 70 percent, and consuming 80 percent less water than more conventional methods.
BMW Battery Recycling Program
The first manufacturer that Redwood has partnered with is BMW North America. Redwood will recycle lithium-ion batteries from all electrified vehicles from the BMW group, including BMW, Mini, Rolls-Royce, and BMW motorcycles – both fully-electric models and plug-in hybrids. Redwood will work with BMW’s network of over 700 retail locations and distribution centers and internal facilities to recover and recycle end-of-life lithium-ion batteries.
Redwood’s two U.S. facilities which recycle, refine, and manufacture battery components. The newest one is located South Carolina, an area rich with automotive history. The region is home to more than 500 automotive companies, including BMW. Redwood’s Carolina Campus is just down the road from BMW Group’s Spartanburg factory and its Woodruff plant, where the company will assemble new fully electric models and the high-voltage battery packs that will power them.
Making EVs Even More Sustainable
Redwood’s partnership with BMW means that battery packs from EVs are properly refined, recycled, and re-enter the battery supply chain. The lithium and other precious metals end up in new EV batteries, helping to make the next generation of EVs more sustainable. Indeed, unlike fossil fuels, the critical minerals inside a battery are infinitely recyclable, and are not used up or lost during a lifetime of usage.
