Making a battery for an electric vehicle typically requires mining hundreds of pounds of hard-to-extract minerals. That’s put a spotlight on batteries’ heavy environmental toll, at least upfront.
But the latest advances in battery recycling, including by leading US battery recycler Redwood Materials, are shrinking EVs’ footprint.
Traditional methods of ripping materials out of the ground and refining them for battery packs requires enormous amounts of energy. As a result, the initial carbon footprint of an EV is higher than a comparable internal combustion engine vehicle. Those upfront emissions are paid back over time with the superior efficiency of electric motors, leading to a 70% reduction in total emissions over the average life of the vehicle.
In the US, it takes about 25,500 miles (41,000 kilometers) of driving for an EV to break even, according to a BloombergNEF analysis. That payback figure, however, assumes that every EV is made with newly mined lithium, nickel and cobalt — as if all the materials will end up in a landfill at the end of a vehicle’s life. But that’s not what’s happening. EV batteries are simply too valuable to toss out, and a new industry of recyclers is busy snatching them all up.
Though still in its infancy, EV recycling is already profitable and capable of recovering more than 95% of the key minerals. A new analysis by Stanford University researchers, which is still under peer review, found that Redwood Materials’ recycling process produces up to 80% fewer emissions than the traditional supply chain using CO2 belching refineries. That’s enough to shorten an average EV’s environmental breakeven time with an internal combustion vehicle to less than 15,000 miles. Every mile thereafter is a carbon win against the internal combustion engine.
Fully assessing when an EV hits its breakeven point depends on the source of electricity used for battery manufacturing and charging the vehicle. Cleaner electricity means a shorter payback period, but even in regions that still get electricity from coal, EVs eventually win out.
The boom in renewable energy will make EVs even less polluting. Solar installations have set annual records worldwide for 22 consecutive years, and the pace appears to be accelerating, according to data from the International Energy Agency. By 2030, when the US grid is expected to get two thirds of its power from carbon-free sources, an EV built with recycled materials could break even on emissions in a matter of months.
The Stanford report found that recycling batteries used 79% less energy and resulted in 55% fewer CO2 emissions compared to traditional refining. Additional savings come from keeping the recycling supply chain local compared to the globe-circling refining process for freshly extracted minerals. Closing the loop brings the total CO2 savings to 80%.
EVs already have a much smaller environmental footprint than internal combustion cars, even in countries that still get most of their electricity from coal. While the toll of mining the raw materials for batteries is considerable, more than 95% of the key minerals can be profitably recycled.
At Redwood, nothing goes to landfill, and no water leaves the facility except the sanitary waste from sinks and toilets. There are no gas lines; everything is electric. It’s also built for scale, allowing the company to quickly break down a truckload of assorted batteries without manual sorting or tedious disassembly.
Recyclers will eventually need to match the pace of car factories. For example, a Tesla factory just 250 miles away in Fremont, California, produced 560,000 EVs last year — more than one every minute. When it’s time for those cars to be recycled, they will generate almost 10 times as much EV battery material as the entire US market processed last year. If recyclers can handle all of that, they would begin to rival traditional mining operations.
“Once we’ve changed over the entire vehicle fleet to electric, and all those minerals are in consumption, we’ll only have to replace a couple percent each year that’s lost in the process,” said Colin Campbell, Redwood’s chief technology officer and the former head of powertrain engineering at Tesla. “It will become obvious to everyone that it doesn’t make sense to dig it out of the ground anymore.”
Again, I’d like to see Bloomberg compare EV battery material to all of the bloody crude oil that has been extracted and refined into gasoline since the first Tesla rolled in 2008.
“Recycling” is a feel good, holy word that really needs to be examined critically. About a year ago a company called Redwood recycling was profitably recycling lithium from some batteries. Of course this was right after the price of lithium had just sky rocketed by an order of magnitude. It has since come back down and I’d doubt Redwood is profitably recycling any lithium today. If you really want the best environmental and economic results from using lithium, you have to weigh cost and benefits of both recycling and disposal.
I note that first video is from a year ago. I still probably should’ve watched it and read the post before making my comment, but my comment still stands. I’m also very skeptical of Stanford researchers writing a report where I suspect they have an incentive (whether conscience or unconscious) to find in favor of recycling. I doubt that they are going to do the actual recycling and if they are consulting the people doing the recycling, these people are probably getting subsidies and have their own incentives.