SHOPSMART AUTOS – CUSTOMER INFORMATION – APRIL 17, 2021 -2
The Race To Crack Battery Recycling—Before It’s Too Late
Straubel declined to go into the specifics of the company’s recovery techniques, but he claims that it can recover between 95 and 98 percent of a battery’s nickel, cobalt, copper, aluminum, and graphite, and more than 80 percent of its lithium. By the time a battery has made it through Redwood’s recycling facility, it has been broken down into its basic ingredients—lithium carbonate, cobalt sulfate, and nickel sulfate—that are ready to be reintegrated into the battery manufacturing process. “We’re going to build a remanufacturing ecosystem for all those batteries,” says Straubel. “Material can get reused almost infinitely. There’s no inherent degradation to the metal atoms.” Many of the challenges that come with lithium-ion recycling stem from the fact that the facilities that process them weren’t designed specifically for cooking down batteries. But people at the vanguard of battery recycling expect that creating dedicated facilities will improve the industry’s economics. “We’re focused on a bespoke process that is specifically designed for lithium ion batteries because we’re starting to see increased volumes,” says Tim Johnston, the cofounder of Li-Cycle, a Canadian battery recycler. “Historically, batteries were viewed as waste, and we seek to turn that on its head by focusing on them as a resource.”
Li-Cycle bills itself as the largest lithium-ion recycler in North America, and takes a different approach to recovery than Redwood. The company’s process skips smelting entirely and refines the battery with leaching alone. First, they drop the batteries into a vat that simultaneously discharges and shreds them. Next, the cells travel through a staged chemical bath to unlock the metals trapped inside them. The process converts almost everything back into a usable raw material—the plastic from the battery’s separator is turned into flakes, the current collectors are turned into copper and aluminum foils, the graphite from the anode is turned into a carbon concentrate, and the cathode materials like nickel, cobalt, and lithium are individually recovered for new batteries. “We don’t produce any meaningful amounts of waste,” says Johnston. “We don’t produce any meaningful amount of air emissions, we don’t produce any waste water, and everything is done at a low temperature. The footprint is very small.” Arguably, the most significant innovation at Li-Cycle is not the chemical processes but the design of the recycling facilities themselves. Li-Cycle uses a “hub and spoke” approach, in which batteries are preprocessed at different sites in the US and Canada, each a modular factory that turns the cells into black mass. The spokes feed this inert material back to a central hub, where it is refined into usable battery-grade chemicals. Today, Li-Cycle operates spokes in Ontario and Rochester, and just received state permission to open its first commercial hub in New York in 2022.
The processing equipment at each spoke is packaged in shipping containers that can be sited close to battery production facilities or municipal collection sites to minimize the distance a battery has to travel once it’s depleted. This system sidesteps one of the most significant hurdles for lithium-ion recycling, which is simply getting the waste where it needs to go. These batteries are federally designated as a Class 9 hazardous material, which means they’re subjected to rigorous—and expensive—shipping restrictions to reduce the risk of fire or explosions during the journey.
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