SHOPSMART AUTOS – CUSTOMER INFORMATION – APRIL 18, 2021 -2
The Race To Crack Battery Recycling—Before It’s Too Late
Still, there are plenty of other changes that can be made to the way battery systems are manufactured to improve recycling efforts, says Carlton Cummins, the CTO of Aceleron. He cofounded the company in 2015 after he started looking into the afterlife of EVs and “realized that you can reuse most of the car except the battery,” he says. “It wasn’t designed for repair, reuse, or upgrade. The key focus at the time was to build it cheaply and quickly.” As a result, the cells used in EV and stationary storage battery packs tend to have multiple welds per battery that connect dozens of batteries so they can be controlled as one unit. Cummins says this is a technique of convenience borrowed from the consumer electronics industry, but it makes automotive battery packs remarkably more difficult to disassemble for upgrades or recycling. Aceleron’s solution to the problem is deceptively simple. Cummins and his team designed a battery container that can be used for a variety of different cell types to link them without a welded connection. The company’s battery platform, Circa, compresses the batteries in a hard shell case and uses a removable circuit to connect them. This means that if an individual cell fails, or the pack’s owner wants to upgrade to a better battery, the cells can be swapped out by loosening some nuts and bolts. “The way batteries are designed today, everything is welded and glued together, and the assumption is that at the end of usage it is disposed of,” says Cummins. “We had to reinvent how you assemble batteries with something that is designed for reuse as well as recycling.” There are still a number of technical, political, and economic challenges that lithium-ion recyclers will have to meet, and success is not guaranteed. Cobalt, for example, is the most expensive material in most EV batteries, but battery manufacturers are chasing new cobalt-free chemistries. It’s uncertain whether recyclers will still find material recovery worthwhile if this valuable mineral isn’t in the mix to sell back to manufacturers. Still, the new generation of battery recyclers are betting that they can find a way to close the loop on the lithium-ion supply chain and make a buck while they do it. If they’re right, they may turn black mass into a green revolution.
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