How can we recycle electric vehicle batteries?
How can we recycle electric vehicle batteries?
Using of electric vehicles are rising day by day in the world. This means that there will be more electric vehicle batteries on the world in the future.
Thanks to the rise in electric vehicle sales, emission values are decreasing.
This is a quite good improvement, but the destiny of the batteries in these cars is still a concern.
For now, people do not think that the recycling of lithium-ion batteries as a profitable investment venture because it is not a big issue for now and the systems of these batteries are complex.
But, the rise in these cars day by day will make this issue a problem in the future. So, we should find a solution to fix this problem.
The aim of the electric vehicles is sustainability. But, if we harm the environment in works such as mining carried out during the production of new batteries, we cant say that this is sustainability.
Thats why, we need to provide that these batteries are recycled. For this, we take some actions. For example, old EV batteries are used in conjunction with solar energy to illuminate streetlights in the town of
Namie in Japan. This is a good improvement, but not as effective as recycling.
Currently the most common EV battery recycling methods are Hydrometallurgy and Pyrometallurgy.
How do electric vehicle batteries recycled through Hydrometallurgy?
Recycling businesses break down important parts manually like metals and plastics that make up batteries.
This is one of the best ways to separate components. Before breaking the batteries, the batteries are discharged.
They use the discharged battery in the recycling process and this is a quite good detail.
The aim in here is that nothing goes to waste. After the batteries are broke, they divide these into different groups.
One of them is 'black mass'. We can say that the black mass is the most important part of this process because it includes important elements such as lithium and cobalt.
Once the operation has come this far, what has been made to recycle batteries is to chemically treat them using a wet process, that is the hydrometallurgical part.
With these operations, they convert the batteries and reduce mineral usage.
How do electric vehicle batteries recycled through pyrometallurgy?
The pyrometallurgy is one of the recycling way of electric vehicle batteries. This way doesnt give good effect and this way is also not good for sustainability.
Because, during this operation, they use very high temperatures for the components to be recycled.
If you work on recycle and it is a harmful operation, it is very important that this should be extremely efficient.
But, this is not the case in this operation because many elements, including Lithium, are not recycled during this operation.
As a result, recycling of electric vehicle batteries is an underdeveloped sector, but it is quite important to improve this sector.
If you have an aim for using of electric vehicles all over the world, you should develope the effective methods to recycle such a large amount of materials.
A sustainable supply chain for the manufacture and recycling of electric vehicle batteries is an extremely important requirement.
