Recycling EV Batteries and Moving “Down Market”
Pyrometallurgy: This process involves burning EV batteries at high temperatures to remove any unwanted plastics or organic matter, and results in only a fraction of the original material being recovered – usually just the copper, nickel or cobalt. A common pyrometallurgical process for EV batteries is smelting, which is simple but also not very ecologically friendly as the process requires the use of pollution-causing fossil fuels.
Hydrometallurgy: A common hydrometallurgical process for EV batteries is leaching, which is the process of soaking lithium-ion cells in strong acids to dissolve the metals into a solution. The success rate of recovering materials, particularly lithium, is much higher using this technique, but it can be an expensive and complex process. Up until now, mining lithium has been viewed as a cheaper and easier alternative to leaching, but it is gaining in popularity as EV use continues to grow. [(CarsGuide: Electric Car Battery Recycling: Can Lithium Batteries be Recycled?)]
Traditional economic incentives continue to point electric vehicle manufacturers down the default path of extracting virgin resources rather than thoroughly recycling the old. When vehicle consumers demand bargain bin prices, the manufacturer will do whatever is necessary to move “down market” and compromise any promising qualities of electric cars so that they are cheap enough to produce and can attract larger portions of the market. Already, Tesla is attempting to remove costly cobalt from its batteries, a material that improved its batteries’ recyclability.
The trend of compromising electric vehicles serves as a window into the phenomenon of “down market” production: These products become less durable, more plastic, with components that are more prone to being thrown in the trash rather than re-used for future potential use. As the economies of scale have always functioned, the lower a product’s price, the higher its hidden cost to the environment and human well-being.
Don’t be too distracted by the switch from combustion engines to electric: You still have plastic and metal trash serving as the chassis and interior that, as the vehicle moves “down market”, is more willing to jump into a landfill than into another car owners’ hands.
Effective battery recycling should be priced into the manufacturing of electric vehicles—even if it costs five thousand, ten thousand dollars more. It appears as though current car culture does not like to consider the death and afterlife of a vehicle, which allowed manufacturers to reduce prices and raise hidden costs as they underinvest in a vehicle’s full lifecycle. But we may have another chance to “price in” a future vehicle’s supposed sustainability by combatting down market pushes, demanding that electric vehicles deliver on a promise of moving people using only a fraction of the waste involved in combustion engine cars.
These electric vehicles will last 10 to 20 years. Where you do want them to end up? We have an unprecedented chance to speak up on these issues; we weren’t prepared or even cognitively ready for the mechanical violence cars had unleashed on us and the environment during the 20th century; now we have had more than a century of vehicular death and decay to understand where we might want this technology to go for the next one hundred years. Make these vehicles safer for people and the environment, during their lifecycle and after.