Electric cars take off, but will battery recycling follow?
Benjamin Reynaga used power tools to hack his way into a beat-up hybrid Honda Fit at an auto dismantling plant at the edge of the Mojave Desert until he reached the most important part of the car: its lithium-ion battery.
The vehicle was set to be crushed, but the battery would be treated with care. It would be disassembled nearby and then sent to Nevada, where another company, Redwood Materials, would recover some of the valuable metals inside.
The plant where Reynaga works, in Adelanto, Calif., is at the front lines of what auto industry experts, environmentalists and the Biden administration believe could be an important part of a global shift to electric vehicles: recycling and reusing metals like cobalt, lithium and nickel. If batteries past their prime supply the ingredients for new ones, electric cars, trucks and vans would become more affordable and environmentally sustainable.
“We’re just getting ready,” said Nick Castillo, who manages the plant for LKQ Corp. The facility mostly dismantles gasoline vehicles but is preparing to take apart more hybrid and electric vehicles. “We know it’s eventually going to take over. It’s going to be the future.”
Sales of electric cars and trucks are taking off, and the auto and battery industries are investing billions of dollars to upgrade and build factories. These cars could help address climate change, but batteries pose their own problems. Raw materials can be hard to mine, are often found in countries with poor human rights records and require processing that leaves behind noxious waste.
Fortunately, those battery ingredients are also highly reusable. And now a race is on to collect and recycle used lithium-ion batteries. Venture capitalists, automakers and energy companies are pouring money into dozens of startup recycling companies in North America and Europe.
“We’re weaning our entire society off of fossil and carbon-intensive fuels; we can’t underestimate the scale of that challenge,” said Gavin Harper, a research fellow at the University of Birmingham in England, who studies battery recycling. “The demand is going to be so enormous.”
But for all the optimism, this new business faces a daunting challenge: Few batteries will be available to recycle for a decade or more. Tesla, which dominates the electric vehicle business, began selling cars in 2008 and until 2017 sold fewer than 100,000 cars a year. There are other sources to recycle today, including hybrids and consumer electronics, but the supply is limited and collection can be challenging.
That has left recycling companies in a difficult position. They need to invest in factories, machinery and workers or risk losing ground to competitors. But if they invest too quickly, they could run out of money before lots of aging batteries arrive at their loading docks.
“You have people that are just burning through money, because you don’t have the feedstock to be able to make the material to sell,” said Eric Frederickson, the managing director of operations for Call2Recycle, a nonprofit program that helps recyclers find old batteries.
The companies also have to figure out how to find, collect and dismantle batteries. They have to work with many dismantlers, scrap yards and nonprofit groups. And because batteries are prone to fires and packaged and built differently from model to model, taking them apart can be complicated and dangerous.
Among companies recycling batteries, Redwood stands out. The company was founded by JB Straubel, a former top Tesla executive, and has raised more than $1 billion from investors, it said.
Redwood sees itself primarily as a producer of battery materials — made from recovered or mined metals — and has established recycling partnerships with Ford Motor, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo.
Redwood also recycles scrap from a battery plant run by Panasonic and Tesla, near Reno, Nev.