It really should not be surprising that we can get very high recovery percentages from batteries -- we do not mine elemental lithium, so the processes we use for extraction are already designed to extract lithium from fairly low-purity sources. In contrast, lithium batteries are an incredibly high-purity source of lithium. The main question is when it will become cost-effective to create recycling pipelines.
Lead acid batteries had a similar trajectory and modern lead acid batteries are effectively 100% recycled.
This is probably somewhat true, but also I suspect there might be an order of magnitude difference from extracting trace lithium from inert rock vs collecting it as a salt from amongst a medley of very refined metals.
Case in point - lead acid batteries are not a fair comparison. A lead acid battery is so robust you can separate the cathodes and anodes with your (gloved) hands. Getting the elements out of a lead battery is like picking pieces of pepperoni off of a pizza. Whereas taking lithium out of a lithium cell is like pulling only a certain protein out of a roll of bologna. And the protein catches fire in contact with air.
> And the protein catches fire in contact with air.
FWIW neither lithium metal nor most Li-ion electrode chemistries autoignite in air at STP. The fire hazard is primarily due to heating up to the ignition temperature through short circuits though there are also exothermic reactions with e.g. water that can heat things up sufficiently.
Being the eager electron donor it is, once it is on fire it is very hard to put out, of course.
As late as the early 80s and probably later there was a guy in the city I live near that had a battery recycling company where they did just that - melted the pitch to extract the cells from the battery "bucket", cut the old cells off and melted them down, cast new grids and put new lead oxide in, and sealed it all up again.
My dad bought a recycled lorry battery off them in the late 70s, and I remember going to the place to pick it up. I can't imagine it was a very safe place to work, and I expect that was pretty much a maximum lifetime exposure to lead in one hit ;-)
There are a fair few risks. Electrical and chemical burns, electrocution, fire, the weights involved, poisoning, heavy metals. It’s hard to think of a risk category that doesn’t apply.
Under normal conditions lithium metal doesn't spontaneously ignite. It is the least spicy of the Group 1 metals (ignoring the special case of hydrogen).
U.S. lead acid baterries recycling has been outsourced.
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As the United States tightened regulations on lead processing to protect Americans over the past three decades, finding domestic lead became a challenge. So the auto industry looked overseas to supplement its supply. In doing so, car and battery manufacturers pushed the health consequences of lead recycling onto countries where enforcement is lax, testing is rare and workers are desperate for jobs.
"
As an Indian this is exactly one of the reasons why I am afraid of EV boom. All of that bad stuff, which we are mostly unfamiliar with (in terms of how to handle it properly, because battery tech is always changing) is going to dumped in places like India. And would silently sustain the bad effects for many decades or even more, until it (the bad stuff) somehow reaches some developed country (probably never).
Lithium batteries are less toxic than most other battery chemistries (including lead acid batteries). The major toxic portion of lithium batteries comes in the form of production, but not the actual materials involved in the battery.
The battery tech also isn't changing as much as you might think. Don't get me wrong, it is getting better, but a lot of that isn't really by changing the underlying formula for the batteries, but rather tweaking the processes for creating the structure of the battery.
That's not to say that you want to inhale the smoke of a burning lithium battery. But these batteries don't have any heavy metals in them. The materials they do have tend to already be in abundance in the environment. A major part of the reason for that is these batteries do need to be cheap. Heavy metals drive up the price.
You paint a happy path. But the devil is in the details that often come to light only much later.
Sure, we could end up with a tech that have really no pollution potential. But there is much higher chance that we would end-up with something bad, that would go into production with a promise of "proper handling and re-cycling", but would never end up getting done...
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that there was no pollution potential or problems.
My point was primarily that the chemicals within the lithium ion batteries are themselves pretty common on the surface and not forever poisons like lead.
My other point was that the major issue around these was primarily the chemicals used to purify and refine. Those can be nasty especially if not treated well.
But all things considered, the risks and potential damage from mishandling the recycling and production of LiPos is a lot lower than the risks that surround things like recycling lead acid batteries.
By volume, there will necessarily be less batteries than there is oil extracted and burned in a week.
I think if you are worried about pollutants, you should be worried about the fumes released every time you start up a fossil fuel engine.
Yes, it's a lot of batteries, but they are batteries with 10 to 20 years of service life as opposed to ~1 week worth of fuel transported, refined, and burned.
When it comes to energy, there's no perfect solution. IMO, LiPos are the best of bad options. Yes they pollute, but they pollute a lot less, particularly over their lifetime.
> you should be worried about the fumes released every time you start up a fossil fuel engine...
I am worried about both. Why are you picking sides? At lease fossil fuels started slow. Here we are switching to an unknown solution(s) on a massive scale..
>but they are batteries with 10 to 20 years of service life as opposed to ~1 week worth of fuel transported, refined, and burned. Yes they pollute, but they pollute a lot less, particularly over their lifetime.
CO2 at least have a natural mechanism by which it gets removed. And the affects of CO2 accumulation is not as acute. I am not sure about the materials that potentially could be used.
Also you say they pollute less. But as I said, the devil is in the details. Remember that the lead that used to get added to gas turned out to be very bad. So may be it is something like that that would be added to the battery chemistry to make it last longer or work better in cold or what not...
It is disturbing that people are just handwaving such possibilities away. I think that was exactly how we got here. But now doing the same could end up a lot more worse...
> I am worried about both. Why are you picking sides?
Because we need a way to generate motion and one method is clearly less pollutant and less toxic than the other, EVs.
Obviously bikes would be even better, but those don't have the capacity to transport everything and everyone we need. If there was another even better way to do things I'd be in favor of that. But as it stands, batteries and electric motors are king in terms of low pollution. (Ok, the absolute best is electric trains and trolleys. But those require infrastructure governments are unwilling to build out.)
> At lease fossil fuels started slow. Here we are switching to an unknown solution(s) on a massive scale
IDK what you mean by slow, but as I mentioned before, a very large quantity of fossil fuels are burnt and released into the atmosphere. That's not a slow process. BEVs only potentially release pollution on manufacturing and then give 10 to 20 years of service life. That's an extremely slow pollution release.
> CO2 at least have a natural mechanism by which it gets removed.
One that's much slower than the production. But also CO2 is not the only thing released when you burn fuel. The others are also linked to negative health outcomes. PM2.5 globally is almost entirely related to burning fossil fuels (though it also goes crazy when wild fires rage). It is linked to a wide range of health problems [1]
> Also you say they pollute less. But as I said, the devil is in the details. Remember that the lead that used to get added to gas turned out to be very bad. So may be it is something like that that would be added to the battery chemistry to make it last longer or work better in cold or what not...
A very key detail that made the lead in gasoline particularly dangerous and bad is the fact that gasoline is burned and spewed into the air. That's a detail I think you are missing.
There is no part in the battery lifecycle that involves discharging the chemicals used (except for H2O during the drying process) into the atmosphere or general environment. And that sort of waste is particularly undesirable. The goal of recycling the batteries is to capture as many of the minerals involved as possible.
Even the worst and absolutely most irresponsible form of battery disposal where we just throw them into landfills and they release all their internal chemicals into the landfill isn't an environmental disaster. The landfills are already a swimming pool of toxic materials and it's job is to contain them.
> It is disturbing that people are just handwaving such possibilities away. I think that was exactly how we got here. But now doing the same could end up a lot more worse...
What's disturbing is you aren't using critical thinking. You are fear mongering. "There could be some unknown unknown which makes these actually bad". Your argument could be used for why we SHOULD put lead into gas. "Well, we don't know what relies on that lead in the environment, if we remove it we could end up damaging lead organisms that have adapted!"
We've thought about it, a lot. Burning fossil fuels is an ongoing global disaster. Batteries would significantly reduce and potentially eliminate the use of fossil fuels. They result in cleaner air, less emissions, and importantly an extremely easy to contain and monitor lifecycle.
Lead acid batteries completely prove this. There are problems with recycling them but those problems are entirely local issues rather than global issue. LiPo, even if they end up being handled irresponsibly, would still end up doing far less damage to the world environment and everyone that isn't directly working with those batteries. We put everything even potentially toxic about the battery in a welded shut cylinder. In 99% of cases, the only way that stuff comes out is someone using force to break open the cylinder.
In the case of fossil fuels, everything is spewed directly into the environment. All the CO2, NOx, CO, randomly created hydrocarbon molecules, unburnt fuel, etc. These things are measurably causing cancer, asthma, heart problems, etc. Every person on the planet is forced to inhale burnt fossil fuels.
>There could be some unknown unknown which makes these actually bad..
No, it is not the unknown unknowns that worry me. It is a very much known aspect. It is "human behavior" and the collective short shortsightedness that goes along with it..
Combine that with any potential issues that EV tech have, and we would find ourselves in a very similar or far worse mess than we are now.
So I want us to be collectively better than that. But the responses that I am getting when I raise this point, does not give me much hope. Because people latch on the easiest thing. That I am "Fear mongering"!
On concrete terms, this would look like some regulation that require EV companies to declare a plan regarding how they will process/recycle old batteries before they launch a product. And a way to closely watch that it is being carried out.
I don't see any efforts or calls to do things like that. As of now, anything "green" gets a free pass.
> So I want us to be collectively better than that. But the responses that I am getting when I raise this point, does not give me much hope. Because people latch on the easiest thing. That I am "Fear mongering"!
It's been studied. You have no concrete problem you can point to. You are fear mongering because you are worried about a potential heretofore demonstrated or observed problem.
And your fears are particularly unfounded because we are actually already producing and recycling these batteries today. If there's a risk, you could point to an exact problem that's being commonly observed right now.
> On concrete terms, this would look like some regulation that require EV companies to declare a plan regarding how they will process/recycle old batteries before they launch a product. And a way to closely watch that it is being carried out.
I don't really disagree with this. My argument is entirely around the fact that even with the absence of such a regulation, the batteries come out on top in terms of their environmental impact. And they are valuable enough that recycling naturally happens without any sort of plan being put into place to handle them.
> As of now, anything "green" gets a free pass.
What you are giving a free pass to is fossil fuels. You are failing to account for the amount of damage they are provably doing right now because they drop their pollutants into the atmosphere.
That's why I call your comments fear mongering. You are hyper focusing on a potential unproven issue that will provably be nowhere near as damaging as burning fossil fuels even in the worst imaginable case as a way to say "Maybe we should just keep burning fossil fuels because they are a better known bad thing".
If we grounded up every single battery ever produced and dumped that particulate matter into the ocean, we will have done far less damage than what's already been done to the ocean from fossil fuel extraction and burning. There is simply not enough material in these batteries to cause the sort of damage you are worried about. Even if these things were all made of the worst most toxic elements imaginable (they aren't).
The concrete issue is this. We seem to want to give every incentives to these companies as possible to get them to drive the EV transition as soon as possible. Even when these incentives are in the form of free pass in terms of lax regulations that I mentioned earlier.
You are asking me to give a concrete example of how it will be abused. I don't have that. Sorry. You win, I guess.
As a Serb, I currently live in a dictatorship actively supported by everyone involved in EV boom. Those who want to profit from mining lithium in Serbia have determined my country should be a mining colony, and they do everything in their power, including financing corrupt murderous regime protested by hundreds of thoudands of Serbs for years, in order to poison our rivers and aral land and extract lithium.
So far we have been able to pause it, but evil never sleeps. Hopefully we overthrow traitors on next election. Won't be easy as all media turned into propaganda brainwashing machine, protesters are being run over by cars driven by pro-government thugs who are being pardoned by president, and instead of being jailed for attempted murder they get promoted, are being given high political functions, and celebrated as defenders of the nation.
Polluted cities getting cleaner for some. Clean rivers and beautiful forests getting poisounous ore pits for others.
>Polluted cities getting cleaner for some. Clean rivers and beautiful forests getting poisounous ore pits for others.
Yes, that is how it goes.
Right now all the "intellectuals" and "thought leaders" are in EV apologetic mode. This is a window of opportunity for the corporate to maximize bad stuff to maximize profits selling EV.
India is a lot like Russia in that its people and standards of living are very different from place to place. China, despite a larger size and similar population is more culturally uniform than India, especially once you go in more remote areas.
(this is not a diss on India, i think that make the country much more interesting)
Still, the overall benefit might be seen as positive for lithium from shifting widespread air pollution from combustion engines to more localized pollution. Though obviously the world needs to work on better processes for the local pollutants.
Anything that you can dig/pump out of the ground is toxic, particularly to water resources, and if you don’t recognize upfront that, be it the military, companies or government, you have to be prepared to clean up your mess, in short, factor in cleanup and the cost of using rare earths or any other item you can dig up on land or pump from the sea or land, but worldwide, mankind is still not quite there in terms of recognizing all of the ramifications up front, short-term thinking is the curse of mankind.
One example I can give of that is the fact that Alaska is home for the largest salmon fishery in the world, a fishery that is more valuable as a food resource than any gold you can extract from the headwaters of Lake Iliamna.
> Anything that you can dig/pump out of the ground is toxic, particularly to water resources
Not really true. There are plenty of non-toxic elements in the ground.
The actual issue with mining is that the elements we are after are often surrounded by the likes of arsenic. Gold is a great example of this as veins of it are often right along and in arsenic.
That said, I do agree about being conscious of what sort of undesirables get leached out from the stuff we pull from the ground. For example, I recently learned that the reason we have to be worried about mercury in ocean fish is because mercury is a major part of the pollutants spewed from coal plants.
but here again, shifting from fossil fuels usage lifecycle - which is literally extract to refine and burn is a much more polluting lifecycle than a 20 year extract, use, recycle lifecycle for lithium or solar or any renewable approach. And its an improvement in both intensity and sheer tonnage of material extracted.
There are other toxic substance like phosphorus in "lithium" batteries. Some "lithium" battery chemistries, though reportedly not LFP, contain cobalt, a very toxic heavy metal. Besides, there isn't a clear definition of what is a heavy metal. Even iron and copper, used in LFP, are considered heavy metals by some.
Cobalt is neither particularly toxic nor a heavy metal. In fact, it's a part of vitamin B12. You might be thinking of Cadmium, which is indeed a very toxic and nasty metal.
In LiPos the heaviest metals are Iron and Nickel. That's by design. Heavier metals tend to be more expensive to procure.
In trace amounts, by both weight and volume lithium batteries are mostly nickel and/or iron.
> There are other toxic substance like phosphorus in "lithium" batteries. Some "lithium" battery chemistries
...
> BTW, lithium itself is highly toxic too.
Both phosphorous and lithium are fertilizers. Yes, taking in a very large dose of both is poisonous, but the same is true of salt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt
Toxicity
The LD50 value for soluble cobalt salts has been estimated to be between 150 and 500 mg/kg. Thus, for a 100 kg person the LD50 would be about 20 grams.[209] Cobaltism (cobalt poisoning) is rare but has resulted from the fabrication of tungsten carbide.[210] Another source is from wear and tear of certain metal-on-metal hip prostheses.[211]
Chronic cobalt ingestion has caused serious health problems at doses far less than the lethal dose. In 1966, the addition of cobalt compounds to stabilize beer foam in Canada led to a peculiar form of toxin-induced cardiomyopathy, which came to be known as beer drinker's cardiomyopathy.[212][213]
Cobalt metal is suspected of causing cancer (i.e., possibly carcinogenic, IARC Group 2B) as per the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Monographs.[214]
It causes respiratory problems when inhaled.[215] It also causes skin problems when touched; after nickel and chromium, cobalt is a major cause of contact dermatitis.[216]
Yeah, too many lead batteries here, and there are a lot of battery recycle factories. It's been a health and environment concern for a while. And these batteries allowed to put motors on rickshaw, we call them "Tesla", And they are also another hazard, and menace for the price of faster transportation.
> It really should not be surprising that we can get very high recovery percentages from batteries -- we do not mine elemental lithium
Plenty of substances we don't mine elementally are not worth recycling. The main advantage with lithium is it tends to go into large volumes of standardised chemistries.
I think the issues with recycling lithium from electrolyte containing lithium hexafluorophosphate in solvents is more the hexafluorophosphate part; it's highly reactive, hygroscopic and releases (toxic, corrosive) hydrogen fluoride upon contact with water. So purely from economic perspective it's possibly not worth it unless we are very lithium-constrained. Of course it should be done anyway as there will be a lot of used batteries in near future.
The article doesn't really give us the details which is a pity.
> Of course it should be done anyway as there will be a lot of used batteries in near future.
The necessity for recycling those batteries, without more, does not logically follow from their relative abundance in view of the purely economic perspective you posit. Why not just bury them?
It may be the scarcity of lithium that may drive us to take otherwise expensive steps to recycle such batteries.
The conclusory "of course" sets the argument up for a failure from the outset. Though it is not the only flaw.
Since Japan is an island country and they have relatively limited lithium rare earth resources, probably, it makes sense for them to look into recycling, and the same would apply to many other countries that don’t have a huge landmass like Canada, United States, China, Australia, and Russia.
It makes sense to try an recycle rare earths or many other types of metals that you may be short of, and I would say for a country like Japan, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, it would make sense to make the effort.
I would think price would be no object if you want to maintain some independence, it’s probably why Switzerland and Denmark are teaming up on Thorium research currently.
If you've ever seen a video of Nigerians "recycling" lead batteries you'd be hard pressed to call it that. Katana in one hand, bucket on the floor, no shoes, let's go.
Lead acid batteries had a similar trajectory and modern lead acid batteries are effectively 100% recycled.