What sort of product do electric vehicle (EV) batteries most resemble — plastic bags or traditional vehicle batteries? The answer is surprisingly fraught.
That is because the vast expansion of electrified transport currently under way is going to generate a growing mountain of waste a decade hence. Decisions taken now would be crucial to whether that mass of lithium, graphite and base metals turns into an environmental crisis, or a model of efficient recycling.
About 10.5 million EVs were sold last year, a number that is to rise to 27 million in 2026 and more than 70 million in 2040, according to BloombergNEF. With the battery on a Tesla Inc Model 3 weighing it at just under 500kg, that means the world will be seeing tens of millions of tonnes of cells being junked every year from the mid-2030s.
If EV batteries are like plastic bags, that is a disaster. Only about 10 percent of plastic packaging gets recycled in the US, with about 3 million tonnes each year going into landfill. Treat spent cells that way and you are looking at vast volumes of heavy metals being buried, risking fires in waste facilities and the release of toxic metals into soil and groundwater.
Alternatively, we could treat them like old-school vehicle batteries. There is hardly any product on the planet that is recycled at higher rates than the 99 percent levels managed by lead-acid cells. Repeating that achievement with lithium-ion might make a surprisingly small dent in the 76 million tonnes of nickel, lithium and cobalt that BloombergNEF reckons we will need by 2050. (Until EV sales’ meteoric growth starts leveling off at about the middle of this century, the metal demand from new vehicles will vastly outstrip the supply from recycling 10-year-old clunkers.) Even so, it would help make electric vehicles eventually become a sustainable part of the circular economy.
The lessons from lead-acid recycling are not particularly comforting, though. Traditional batteries all follow a uniform design that has not changed much since the 19th century. After the cells are pulverized, the main materials — lead, acid and plastic — are easily separated in flotation tanks, before the metal is passed through a smelter to produce relatively pure lead bullion.
Electric vehicle batteries, on the other hand, cover an ever-changing gamut of established and emerging chemistries and mechanical designs. Auto manufacturers traditionally focused their expertise on engine design and outsourced most of the rest of the vehicle to parts suppliers. With engines going the way of the dodo, they are now keen to differentiate themselves based on their different electric power technologies.
Even setting chemistry aside, the simple positioning of screws and welds could confound efforts to carry out efficient large-scale reuse. It costs about four times as much to dismantle a Nissan Leaf battery as one from a BYD Han, according to one study published in February.
That is a problem. Recycling is a low-margin business that performs best when — as with lead-acid batteries — the waste streams are relatively pure and uniform. The same goes for utilities, who could use batteries too degraded for vehicles to help balance out fluctuations in power supply from wind and solar generators, but need a good understanding of what they are connecting up to make it worth the effort.
The profitability of battery recycling depends largely on the value of their most important constituents, such as cobalt and lithium — but with prices of those raw materials falling by about 60 percent and 35 percent respectively in the past year alone, it is anyone’s guess what those numbers would be when the current wave of cells comes on the reuse and recycling market a decade hence.
Where such recovery is too difficult, even valuable raw materials are not sufficient to overcome the advantages of buying a new product off the shelf. Little more than half of all catalytic converters are recycled, despite their rich payload of platinum-group metals. The recycling industry is already facing a glut of capacity, as my colleague Adam Minter has written. The last thing we need is a wave of bankruptcies killing off the nascent sector for good.
Governments can play a role in fixing this. Manufacturers would resist making identical battery packs, but a nudge in the right direction could foster sufficient standardization to keep the reuse and recycling industry in the black. Simply labeling battery components with uniform QR codes would make it easier to sort waste cells into usable streams. Better still, governments could establish a credits system similar to those the EU uses for carbon emissions and the UK for product packaging, making manufacturers pay for battery disposal unless they can transfer the risk to recyclers or investors via tradable securities.
Tough landfill taxes would help, too — and standards would need to be global, since many vehicles in rich countries end up sold second-hand in emerging economies.
Tens of millions of tonnes of EV battery waste might seem small next to the 2.5 billion tonnes of gasoline and crude oil that we burn each year and the 610 million tonnes of scrap steel — much of it from junked vehicles — we produce. Still, if we want a sustainable economy fit for the 21st century, governments and the EV industry need to tackle this problem now. It is only going to get bigger.
David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy and commodities. Previously, he worked for Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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