Will Recycling Lithium-Ion Batteries That Are Cobalt-Free Be Worth It
We have already reached crisis mode in finding safe and efficient ways of recycling hybrid and EV batteries. It’s not that the batteries aren’t worth recycling — it’s the process of recycling them that causes the problem. It is so expensive and dangerous to recycle lithium-ion batteries; if it weren’t for the cost of cobalt, in some cases, just mining for more raw materials might be a cheaper option to everyone’s pocketbook.
The Problem With Mining For Cobalt
Out of all of the precious materials that are used in lithium-ion batteries, cobalt is the most valuable. With approximately 70-percent of the world’s cobalt being mined from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) — it poses a huge ecological, ethical, and human rights abuse and child labor problem. But on the recycling end, it helps boost the profitability and the want to recycle lithium-ion batteries.
The Cost Of Recycling Lithium-Ion Batteries
From the lowest end of the recycling chain up to the top where the automakers themselves have problems finding out what to do with the batteries, it makes sense to just find a way to get rid of the batteries instead of recycling them.
40-percent of the recycling cost of lithium-ion batteries is in transportation alone. Hybrid and EV batteries are too large and heavy to be shipped by plane, so instead, dealerships are just opting to ship the whole car to a recycling center to have a battery disposed of and a new or refurbished one replaced.
Automakers have come up with their own solution to help save money, and that’s just to simply store them away in an Oaklama recycling facility or something similar until either the recycling cost goes down or the other raw materials other than Cobalt like nickel, lithium, iron, and manganese become more valuable, along with copper and aluminum.
The Solution: Making Recycling Batteries More Profitable
The solution is obvious. When there was a problem with lead-acid batteries used in gasoline engines being disregarded anywhere as garbage, a deposit was put on them in exchange for a new battery. And now about 90-percent of all lead-acid batteries get recycled.
Does that mean the obvious is easy? Absolutely not! The problem is if a battery recycling industry is going to work, it has to work full-circle. Everyone will always have their hands out, and everyone will want to get paid. If it’s cheaper to mine all materials besides cobalt, and we go that route instead of finding a profitable solution for all when it comes to recycling, what will have is just a slide in saving the environment on one end. What we won’t have is a solution to hazardous lithium-ion batteries that are no good that no one wants because they are not worth recycling.
A Light At The End Of The Tunnel
It seems as if these worries did not fall on deaf ears as a recent article in IEEE Spectrum, an official magazine/journal of the Institute of Electric and Electronics, refers to the Circular Energy Storage, saying that there are about 100 companies globally operating currently on recycling batteries or are in the makings of coming up with a plan.
Plus, automotive makers like BMW, Nissan, Tesla, Honda, Volkswagen, and more have seen the profitable future in putting big money into these operations. Whether it is to utilize recycling batteries for the use of energy storage for solar power plants, windmill plants, solar efficient houses, and buildings or to simply just put them back into vehicles, making future plans to recycle just seems to make more sense to more automakers.
The Upside And Downside Of Using Cobalt-Free Batteries For The Consumer
Along with the problems mentioned above about the mining for cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, there is also the problem of who controls most of the cobalt mining sector and cobalt refining industries. One of the issues that make cobalt so expensive is that China has about 70-percent of control over the mining sector and 80-percent of control over the refining industry. And with the U.S.-China trade war, it makes it hard to have the precious material on-hand without paying a pretty penny.
So if you were wondering, there are already cobalt-free batteries on the market that are lithium iron phosphate, or LFP. These batteries are already being used in some entry-level Tesla, Ford, and Volkswagen EV vehicles, with more companies probably following suit.
What’s the downside? Although technology is always in the works for improvement on everything electric, the downside is low energy density causing a shorter range for the battery, CNBC quotes Sam Adham, a senior powertrain research analyst at LMC Automotive. There is also another downside to the LFP batteries, and that is China controls much of that supply chain here as well.
So Will Recycling Batteries Become Cheaper And More Efficient and Less Dependent On Cobalt?
Not only will recycling batteries in the future become cheaper, more efficient, and less dependent on cobalt to be profitable, the U.S. is already aiming to become less dependent on foreign resources for EV vehicles as a whole. But just like anything, it will take some time. More likely, the recycling of batteries will become more efficient when the industry of recycling batteries becomes more profitable for everyone involved.