Recycling can help fill battery materials shortages

Start to look to America's garages for the critical battery minerals needed to power the global shift to electric vehicles.

As environmental policies in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere call for more transportation electrification and multiple nations are poised to curtail sales of internal combustion-engine vehicles as early as 2030, the need for EV batteries will grow exponentially.

Yet supplies of critical minerals such as lithium, nickel, graphite and cobalt already are constrained by various environmental and political factors. Extracting minerals from EV batteries as their storage capacity wanes can help ease the crunch.

About 1.2 million batteries from electrified passenger and commercial vehicles are expected to be retired globally in 2030, the numbers rising to 50 million by 2050.

Recycling just half of them could reduce the need for new mining operations and cut the demand for virgin battery minerals by up to 28 percent, according to a February 2023 study by the International Council on Clean Transportation in San Francisco.

It will take two-and-a-half decades for recycled material to make a significant difference because of the lag time between a battery's debut and its demise. EV batteries are warrantied for a minimum of eight years in the U.S. — 10 years in some states. Real-world experience suggests that many will last even longer, said Dale Hall, a senior researcher at the council and co-author of the study.

Right now, factory scrap from battery manufacturing plants provides much of the raw material for battery recycling operations, said Yijin Liu, an energy storage systems researcher and associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Critics of electrified vehicles predict there will be vast landfills stuffed with decomposing EV batteries leaking their toxic innards onto the soil and into the air.

That's not likely to happen, though. Those innards are valuable and there's a market for them, Hall said.

Recycler Redwood Materials reported in March 2023 that it had recaptured more than 95 percent of the critical minerals in 250 tons of EV and hybrid vehicle batteries it collected in a pilot project.

Lithium, copper, cobalt and nickel are sold back to battery makers or refined and used in-house in the Carson City, Nev., company's copper foil and battery anode and cathode manufacturing operations, said Alexis Georgeson, Redwood's

spokesperson.

Redwood Materials, with its plant in Nevada and one in development in South Carolina, isn't as dependent on factory scrap as other companies might be. While it acquires depleted and recalled batteries from Audi, Ford, Polestar, Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen, Volvo and other automakers, Redwood also recycles batteries from electric bicycle makers and from consumer and medical electronics. Another source is production waste from General Motors' Ultium battery operation.

"If you equate us to a lithium or nickel mine, we are the largest producer to come online in the last few decades," Georgeson said.

While recycling can be a valuable resource, issues remain, such as controlling where the recovered material ends up, said Margaret Mann, researcher at the Colorado-based National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

As part of an effort to promote development of a domestic supply chain, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 prohibits federal incentives for EVs with battery materials that come from a number of countries, including China and Russia. Yet a lot of material recovered by recyclers in the U.S. is sent overseas for processing, Mann said.

Some recycling operations also raise environmental concerns because they use a process that requires used batteries to be burned, releasing toxic gases.

Newer recycling operators typically employ a process called hydrometallurgy that utilizes reusable acids to leach the minerals from the battery cells. The process consumes less energy and has a lower environmental impact than burning batteries.

Battery recyclers also face competition from those who favor using decommissioned EV batteries for stationary storage of energy produced at solar and wind farms. Those batteries retain substantial storage capacity, if not enough to adequately power a vehicle.

The International Council on Clean Transportation study figured that half of all retired EV batteries would be used for stationary storage.

The ability of recycling to cut the need for critical mineral mining would decline if the percentage of batteries diverted to power storage increased, Hall said.

There's also some concern that a global shift to EV battery chemistries such as lithium iron phosphate, with less valuable mineral content than today's nickel and cobalt-rich batteries, could dampen investors' enthusiasm for funding EV battery recycling operations, Mann said.

Redwood, perhaps the most successful domestic recycling operation today, disagrees.

The company says it already is profitably recycling lithium iron phosphate batteries, which are less energy dense and used by EV makers in models where range is not as important as cost.

As sales of EVs increase — and most industry watchers say that is a given, despite a recent slowing of the growth curve — the number of batteries ultimately available for recycling will rise.

"We are in the early stage of recycling now, but we are seeing positive examples, like Redwood, and a market will exist," said Ben Prochazka, executive director of Electrification Coalition, a nonprofit EV lobbying group. "The recycled minerals are too valuable to be discarded."