6 ms·

i just fear it will be the same story as plastics: the industry tells us consumption is not a problem because the material is recyclable, but there is actually

i just fear it will be the same story as plastics: the industry tells us consumption is not a problem because the material is recyclable, but there is actually no economic incentive to recycle, so it is landfilled instead.

mlindner 4y ago
Except batteries are incredibly valuable to recycle as the batteries are a high grade ore. Companies like Redwood Materials have publicly said they are already profitable (cash flow positive) if you remove their R&D and money they're using to expand to meet demand.
bittercynic 4y ago
That happens with plastic because that particular material is usually not economical to recycle (at least as long as the industry is able to externalize some important costs.) I don't think you can say the same for batteries. There is valuable and scarce material contained in batteries, and it seems likely that someone will find a way to make it happen.
nmehner 4y ago
At least in the EU/UK it is required by law to recycle 95% of a car: https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/95207/car-recycling-how-much-of-your-old-car-is-reused https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/95207/car-recycling-h... A problem with plastics is that it is hard to create high quality plastics from recycled materials. And there is only a limited demand for park benches made from low quality recycled plastics. This is different with metals where you can "just" melt everything and separate the metals. This is probably less expensive than mining the materials in the first place where the ore contains a much lower share of the metals. Also a car contains a few hundred kilograms of recyclable materials and there is a very limited number of different models. So there is an economic incentive.
- gst 4y ago
  > This is different with metals where you can "just" melt everything and separate the metals. How would you separate the metals after melting them? My understanding is that you can extract some high valuable metals via different processes, but otherwise it's technologically and economically not feasible to separate molten metals.
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    Different metals have different melting points, don't they?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - gst 4y ago
      Yes, but if a metal with a lower melting point is in fluid state inside another solid metal that's not better than having both in a fluid (or solid) state. Here's a related Quora discussion: https://www.quora.com/If-you-smelted-a-varied-mix-of-scrap-metal-would-you-be-able-to-separate-them-while-the-mix-is-still-molten https://www.quora.com/If-you-smelted-a-varied-mix-of-scrap-m...
      - sdenton4 4y ago
        Seems like you can choose during manufacturing to make things easier to disassemble to enable easier recycling... So the answer to low-melting metals inside high-melting metals is just "Don't do that" because otherwise you'll miss the 95% recyclable policy.
    - Groxx 4y ago
      To maybe make the other answers a bit more explicit / layman friendly: Yes, and if you have a bunch of small pieces of different metals all mixed together, you can very carefully melt one, extract it, then the next, etc by gradually raising the temperature. But if you take an alloy, e.g. bronze, you're combining ~2 metals of different melting points (copper ~1100C, and tin ~230C) to get essentially a new metal with a usually-middling melting point (bronze ~920-970C). Raising bronze to ~300C will not melt the tin out for you to collect. It's not just a surface area issue either, chopping it up into many tiny pieces / a powder won't melt more out and give you something to collect. None will. It'll all melt at bronze's temperature, and until then it all remains solid. Similarly, if you melt bronze and then cool it down a bit, the copper won't solidify on its own. The whole solution will solidify around 950C. It's kinda like how salty water solidifies at a lower temperature - it's not that the water is freezing at -1C but the salt is not, that'd be a slush (and wouldn't make much sense anyway, salt is solid at room temperature). The solution behaves as a new "whole". If you want to separate two alloyed metals, you generally have to chemically bind some to something else so it comes out of solution in a way you can capture. Then you can skim it off / extract it from the bottom / etc. One less-visually-obvious strategy is to just keep the alloy hot and exposed to the air, so some of it oxidizes and comes out as slag - that's chemical separation using oxygen. It works pretty well for gold, because unlike many metals gold does not oxidize. You can also sometimes let the metals separate themselves by density by just letting it sit while melted..... but you'll be fighting against any internal currents set up by temperature differences, so it's difficult, imprecise, and slow to do in practice. But for some combinations and equipment it's feasible.
- torginus 4y ago
  Can't we just burn plastics? Most of them are hydrocarbons similar to gasoline. Granted, it's not 100% clean, but the amount of CO2 created by burning all the plastics in the car can't be much worse than a couple tanks worth of gas.
  - cstejerean 4y ago
    Or just package it in something that won’t allow the plastic to leech and then bury it for the carbon capture.
  - gst 4y ago
    What would be the advantage of doing that? We're currently researching CO2 sequestration to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store it somewhere outside of the atmosphere. So what would we gain by burning plastics? Even if they are not recycled - having those plastics in a landfill is a lot better than burning them and putting CO2 into the atmosphere.
    - antupis 4y ago
      Carbon capture + burning is probably best especially cold places which needs district heating. Eg Norway has now pilot ongoing https://bellona.org/news/ccs/2022-03-oslo-leading-by-example-worlds-first-co2-capture-and-storage-on-waste-incinerator-to-become-reality-in-2026 https://bellona.org/news/ccs/2022-03-oslo-leading-by-example...
      - seoaeu 4y ago
        What? Renewable energy from wind or solar is vastly easier than burning fossil fuel and then trying to get the resulting CO2 back out of the air
        ThunderSizzle 4y ago
        Vegetation tends to do pretty well at handling CO2. Also, destroying the landscape to "save the climate" still ends with destroying the environment. Wind and solar aren't energy dense enough to justify the damage they cause.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
Plastic and paper are hard to recycle because the value is in the structure of the material, and processing destroys the structure. In the case of batteries we just want to pull out the elements, which are impossible to destroy by processing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
moralestapia 4y ago
And, if you thought plastic-filled landfills were bad, wait until we have battery-filled landfills around.
- SECProto 4y ago
  Sounds like a good place to open a lithium & rare earths mine.
balaji1 4y ago
This push for EV seems to be very popular with all parts of society - gov/politicians, industry, influential investors - with potentially vested interests and the media also (any publicity is good publicity). At this point, any aggressive direction change from humanity has to be thought through well about environmental impact - of course no one has the incentive to do that and hence the gov has to pick it up. EV is probably being justified as "loss leader" in terms of environmental impact - it has to be net bad for the environment right now, but eventually better for the environment. That's not good enough.
- balaji1 4y ago
  more trends that could benefit from more intentional long-term thinking - vegan meat-substitutes, lab-grown meat, DNA/gene editing [what else? would love to hear more from others]. In general, these trends offer nice openings for new businesses to be a first-mover and grow quickly (these days, businesses are not even making profits in the short-term).
grapeskin 4y ago
I think that for now lithium mining is quite expensive, and will potentially get more expensive when everything needs batteries and finding large deposits becomes more difficult. On the other hand, there’s so much oil flowing that we have periods where the biggest problem is finding where we can store it. Amounts of plastic needed for general consumer uses are often measured in pennies (or less) so there hasn’t been any drive to even consider recycling from the producer side. But it’s also possible huge lithium deposits will be found that lower prices, or we’ll find a cheaper alternative battery that makes disposability a more obvious solution than recycling. But as another data point, lead acid car batteries are generally recycled. Lithium batteries are very different, but they’ll likely face similar motivations due to cost.
- pkdpic 4y ago
  That's a really excellent point about existing car battery recycling / safe disposal. Imperfect as I'm sure it is. Concrete precedent though.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  This does partly rely on it being cheaper to extract lithium from spent batteries than it is to mine. Lead acid batteries are easy to recycle because there is exactly one chemistry used in car batteries. LiIon is not yet as standard.
  - iostream24 4y ago
    The chemistry varying isn’t the real world issue, as I understand it, it’s the varying interconnection and cell packaging… aka the plastic and the inter-cell wiring. Snip snip, a lot slower than it should be, and the actual packages and cell trays should be standardized as well.
- throwntoday 4y ago
  Lithium is very abundant, and methods for extracting from dried lake beds or sea water are under way. Nickel is a far greater concern.
phkahler 4y ago
Someone needs to say "we're going to build and own this recycling industry" and just build it. It's not the kind of business you aim to IPO, it's the kind where you invest a lot to earn a little - for a long time.
totetsu 4y ago
It's not just about economic incentives. There are geopolitical incentives to not be completely reliant on the few countries that currently extract the raw materials for batteries. If we are to shift away from fossil fuels, we will be more and more dependent on these things. https://insideevs.com/news/372133/91-of-lithium-three-countries/ https://insideevs.com/news/372133/91-of-lithium-three-countr...
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  If you are hoping for more politicians that play hard ball with China, I am not optimistic.
analog31 4y ago
Most people don't service their own cars any more, much less dispose of them. This makes it easier to regulate recycling, by imposing the mandate on service facilities. Today, every car shop recycles lead-acid batteries and used engine oil. They are required to take used oil from DIY'ers. If you replace your own battery, as I've done, you trade the old one in or pay an extra charge that you get back when you return the old battery.
- IntrepidWorm 4y ago
  It's a good point, though I will caution that in the case of paper and plastic waste, many consumers have much less control over product end-of-life than petroleum and paper industry would have them believe. Regulating at an industry level is necessary for more than just battery recycling, as passing the buck to the consumers is not a viable solution for anything other than saving face.
omgwtfbyobbq 4y ago
That has not been the case with NiMH hybrid batteries and I suspect it will not be the case for EV batteries.
xeromal 4y ago
Batteries will probably be like many other car parts. You get charged a core fee and you receive the cash once it's returned.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  You know what the core charge on a bald tire is? It's negative. If you wanna give them back to the shop that changed your tires you pay them, not the other way around. And they sit in a pile out back until someone gets paid to take them all away. Some of them get recycled properly but there's no shortage of people who are happy being paid money to take a truck load of used tires from a tire shop and dump them on their property as fill. Core charges as you're describing them don't work for items the manufacturers can't economically recondition and therefore don't want back.
gscott 4y ago
There are thousands of formulations of platics but few different types of car batteries.
eternityforest 4y ago
There's probably going to need to be some regulations. But EV batteries are much less spread out than cigarette butts. The waste is generated in predictable places like mechanics shops, and doesn't involve casual consumer decisions like whether to litter or recycle a pop bottle.
Isinlor 4y ago
There is very strong economic incentive to reuse car batteries. A battery may loose 40% capacity. That's bad for a car, but perfectly fine for stationary electricity storage. Also, EU has "End of Life Vehicles Directive" since 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_Life_Vehicles_Directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_Life_Vehicles_Directive
mgoetzke 4y ago
As long as abundant amounts of oil are available, plastic will be relatively expensive to recycle. That too will change
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
There is and was an economic incentive to recycle plastic. The people who sold the inputs to make fresh plastic didn't want you to believe that, because it would affect their sales. The people making stuff with the plastic didnt want to pay for it if their competitors didn't, so they waited on a law. Group number 1 stopped such a law in any country where people who sell the input for plastics have a lot of political power. Unless the people who produce lithium become powerful enough to force people to give them money for no good reason, it'll get recycled.

mlindner 4y ago

Except batteries are incredibly valuable to recycle as the batteries are a high grade ore. Companies like Redwood Materials have publicly said they are already profitable (cash flow positive) if you remove their R&D and money they're using to expand to meet demand.

bittercynic 4y ago

That happens with plastic because that particular material is usually not economical to recycle (at least as long as the industry is able to externalize some important costs.) I don't think you can say the same for batteries. There is valuable and scarce material contained in batteries, and it seems likely that someone will find a way to make it happen.

nmehner 4y ago

At least in the EU/UK it is required by law to recycle 95% of a car: https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/95207/car-recycling-how-much-of-your-old-car-is-reused https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/95207/car-recycling-h... A problem with plastics is that it is hard to create high quality plastics from recycled materials. And there is only a limited demand for park benches made from low quality recycled plastics. This is different with metals where you can "just" melt everything and separate the metals. This is probably less expensive than mining the materials in the first place where the ore contains a much lower share of the metals. Also a car contains a few hundred kilograms of recyclable materials and there is a very limited number of different models. So there is an economic incentive.

gst 4y ago
> This is different with metals where you can "just" melt everything and separate the metals. How would you separate the metals after melting them? My understanding is that you can extract some high valuable metals via different processes, but otherwise it's technologically and economically not feasible to separate molten metals.
- missedthecue 4y ago
  Different metals have different melting points, don't they?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - gst 4y ago
    Yes, but if a metal with a lower melting point is in fluid state inside another solid metal that's not better than having both in a fluid (or solid) state. Here's a related Quora discussion: https://www.quora.com/If-you-smelted-a-varied-mix-of-scrap-metal-would-you-be-able-to-separate-them-while-the-mix-is-still-molten https://www.quora.com/If-you-smelted-a-varied-mix-of-scrap-m...
    - sdenton4 4y ago
      Seems like you can choose during manufacturing to make things easier to disassemble to enable easier recycling... So the answer to low-melting metals inside high-melting metals is just "Don't do that" because otherwise you'll miss the 95% recyclable policy.
  - Groxx 4y ago
    To maybe make the other answers a bit more explicit / layman friendly: Yes, and if you have a bunch of small pieces of different metals all mixed together, you can very carefully melt one, extract it, then the next, etc by gradually raising the temperature. But if you take an alloy, e.g. bronze, you're combining ~2 metals of different melting points (copper ~1100C, and tin ~230C) to get essentially a new metal with a usually-middling melting point (bronze ~920-970C). Raising bronze to ~300C will not melt the tin out for you to collect. It's not just a surface area issue either, chopping it up into many tiny pieces / a powder won't melt more out and give you something to collect. None will. It'll all melt at bronze's temperature, and until then it all remains solid. Similarly, if you melt bronze and then cool it down a bit, the copper won't solidify on its own. The whole solution will solidify around 950C. It's kinda like how salty water solidifies at a lower temperature - it's not that the water is freezing at -1C but the salt is not, that'd be a slush (and wouldn't make much sense anyway, salt is solid at room temperature). The solution behaves as a new "whole". If you want to separate two alloyed metals, you generally have to chemically bind some to something else so it comes out of solution in a way you can capture. Then you can skim it off / extract it from the bottom / etc. One less-visually-obvious strategy is to just keep the alloy hot and exposed to the air, so some of it oxidizes and comes out as slag - that's chemical separation using oxygen. It works pretty well for gold, because unlike many metals gold does not oxidize. You can also sometimes let the metals separate themselves by density by just letting it sit while melted..... but you'll be fighting against any internal currents set up by temperature differences, so it's difficult, imprecise, and slow to do in practice. But for some combinations and equipment it's feasible.
torginus 4y ago
Can't we just burn plastics? Most of them are hydrocarbons similar to gasoline. Granted, it's not 100% clean, but the amount of CO2 created by burning all the plastics in the car can't be much worse than a couple tanks worth of gas.
- cstejerean 4y ago
  Or just package it in something that won’t allow the plastic to leech and then bury it for the carbon capture.
- gst 4y ago
  What would be the advantage of doing that? We're currently researching CO2 sequestration to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store it somewhere outside of the atmosphere. So what would we gain by burning plastics? Even if they are not recycled - having those plastics in a landfill is a lot better than burning them and putting CO2 into the atmosphere.
  - antupis 4y ago
    Carbon capture + burning is probably best especially cold places which needs district heating. Eg Norway has now pilot ongoing https://bellona.org/news/ccs/2022-03-oslo-leading-by-example-worlds-first-co2-capture-and-storage-on-waste-incinerator-to-become-reality-in-2026 https://bellona.org/news/ccs/2022-03-oslo-leading-by-example...
    - seoaeu 4y ago
      What? Renewable energy from wind or solar is vastly easier than burning fossil fuel and then trying to get the resulting CO2 back out of the air
      - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
        Vegetation tends to do pretty well at handling CO2. Also, destroying the landscape to "save the climate" still ends with destroying the environment. Wind and solar aren't energy dense enough to justify the damage they cause.

bryanlarsen 4y ago

Plastic and paper are hard to recycle because the value is in the structure of the material, and processing destroys the structure. In the case of batteries we just want to pull out the elements, which are impossible to destroy by processing.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

moralestapia 4y ago

And, if you thought plastic-filled landfills were bad, wait until we have battery-filled landfills around.

SECProto 4y ago
Sounds like a good place to open a lithium & rare earths mine.

balaji1 4y ago

This push for EV seems to be very popular with all parts of society - gov/politicians, industry, influential investors - with potentially vested interests and the media also (any publicity is good publicity). At this point, any aggressive direction change from humanity has to be thought through well about environmental impact - of course no one has the incentive to do that and hence the gov has to pick it up. EV is probably being justified as "loss leader" in terms of environmental impact - it has to be net bad for the environment right now, but eventually better for the environment. That's not good enough.

balaji1 4y ago
more trends that could benefit from more intentional long-term thinking - vegan meat-substitutes, lab-grown meat, DNA/gene editing [what else? would love to hear more from others]. In general, these trends offer nice openings for new businesses to be a first-mover and grow quickly (these days, businesses are not even making profits in the short-term).

grapeskin 4y ago

I think that for now lithium mining is quite expensive, and will potentially get more expensive when everything needs batteries and finding large deposits becomes more difficult. On the other hand, there’s so much oil flowing that we have periods where the biggest problem is finding where we can store it. Amounts of plastic needed for general consumer uses are often measured in pennies (or less) so there hasn’t been any drive to even consider recycling from the producer side. But it’s also possible huge lithium deposits will be found that lower prices, or we’ll find a cheaper alternative battery that makes disposability a more obvious solution than recycling. But as another data point, lead acid car batteries are generally recycled. Lithium batteries are very different, but they’ll likely face similar motivations due to cost.

pkdpic 4y ago
That's a really excellent point about existing car battery recycling / safe disposal. Imperfect as I'm sure it is. Concrete precedent though.
aidenn0 4y ago
This does partly rely on it being cheaper to extract lithium from spent batteries than it is to mine. Lead acid batteries are easy to recycle because there is exactly one chemistry used in car batteries. LiIon is not yet as standard.
- iostream24 4y ago
  The chemistry varying isn’t the real world issue, as I understand it, it’s the varying interconnection and cell packaging… aka the plastic and the inter-cell wiring. Snip snip, a lot slower than it should be, and the actual packages and cell trays should be standardized as well.
throwntoday 4y ago
Lithium is very abundant, and methods for extracting from dried lake beds or sea water are under way. Nickel is a far greater concern.

phkahler 4y ago

Someone needs to say "we're going to build and own this recycling industry" and just build it. It's not the kind of business you aim to IPO, it's the kind where you invest a lot to earn a little - for a long time.

totetsu 4y ago

It's not just about economic incentives. There are geopolitical incentives to not be completely reliant on the few countries that currently extract the raw materials for batteries. If we are to shift away from fossil fuels, we will be more and more dependent on these things. https://insideevs.com/news/372133/91-of-lithium-three-countries/ https://insideevs.com/news/372133/91-of-lithium-three-countr...

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
If you are hoping for more politicians that play hard ball with China, I am not optimistic.

analog31 4y ago

Most people don't service their own cars any more, much less dispose of them. This makes it easier to regulate recycling, by imposing the mandate on service facilities. Today, every car shop recycles lead-acid batteries and used engine oil. They are required to take used oil from DIY'ers. If you replace your own battery, as I've done, you trade the old one in or pay an extra charge that you get back when you return the old battery.

IntrepidWorm 4y ago
It's a good point, though I will caution that in the case of paper and plastic waste, many consumers have much less control over product end-of-life than petroleum and paper industry would have them believe. Regulating at an industry level is necessary for more than just battery recycling, as passing the buck to the consumers is not a viable solution for anything other than saving face.

omgwtfbyobbq 4y ago

That has not been the case with NiMH hybrid batteries and I suspect it will not be the case for EV batteries.

xeromal 4y ago

Batteries will probably be like many other car parts. You get charged a core fee and you receive the cash once it's returned.

throwaway0a5e 4y ago
You know what the core charge on a bald tire is? It's negative. If you wanna give them back to the shop that changed your tires you pay them, not the other way around. And they sit in a pile out back until someone gets paid to take them all away. Some of them get recycled properly but there's no shortage of people who are happy being paid money to take a truck load of used tires from a tire shop and dump them on their property as fill. Core charges as you're describing them don't work for items the manufacturers can't economically recondition and therefore don't want back.

gscott 4y ago

There are thousands of formulations of platics but few different types of car batteries.

eternityforest 4y ago

There's probably going to need to be some regulations. But EV batteries are much less spread out than cigarette butts. The waste is generated in predictable places like mechanics shops, and doesn't involve casual consumer decisions like whether to litter or recycle a pop bottle.

Isinlor 4y ago

There is very strong economic incentive to reuse car batteries. A battery may loose 40% capacity. That's bad for a car, but perfectly fine for stationary electricity storage. Also, EU has "End of Life Vehicles Directive" since 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_Life_Vehicles_Directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_Life_Vehicles_Directive

mgoetzke 4y ago

As long as abundant amounts of oil are available, plastic will be relatively expensive to recycle. That too will change

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

There is and was an economic incentive to recycle plastic. The people who sold the inputs to make fresh plastic didn't want you to believe that, because it would affect their sales. The people making stuff with the plastic didnt want to pay for it if their competitors didn't, so they waited on a law. Group number 1 stopped such a law in any country where people who sell the input for plastics have a lot of political power. Unless the people who produce lithium become powerful enough to force people to give them money for no good reason, it'll get recycled.