The road to recovery

Earlier this year, the UK government announced that the sale of new petrol, diesel and hybrid vehicles would be banned from 2035 onwards, five years earlier than initially planned. Other countries continue to follow suit as the world pushes towards the targets set out in the Paris Agreement, which aims to keep the global average temperature increase below 2degC per year.

With both countries and car manufacturers continuing to ban internal combustion engine vehicles from their repertoire, the reliance on electric vehicles (EV) is growing. Experts are now predicting there could be over 140 million electric cars on the world’s roads by 2030. This expected boom will leave us with over 11 million tonnes of used lithium-ion batteries that need to be recycled between now and 2030, so researchers across the globe are racing against time to develop an efficient and economic automotive battery recycling process the world can quickly adopt.

So why is recycling batteries suddenly so important? ‘As batteries continue to appear in vehicles, we’re moving from batteries that weighed 100g in a ’phone to something that weighs 100kg, or even 1,000kg,’ highlights David Greenwood, professor at Advanced Propulsion Systems, WMG at the University of Warwick. ‘Those batteries embody large amounts of valuable and sometimes rare materials. To extract those is expensive, and can be harmful to the environment if done wrong.

‘Therefore, as we move into this kind of second generation of electric vehicles, it’s important that we’re not continuously reliant on the extraction and refining of new materials, but instead are reclaiming materials from the waste products of the previous generation of batteries.’

‘It’s important we’re not continuously reliant on the extraction and refining of new materials’
David Greenwood, professor at Advanced Propulsion Systems, WMG at the University of Warwick

From a carbon footprint perspective alone, recycling is a better alternative to mining, as Kristof Gabriël, commercial director refining and recycling at Umicore explains: ‘In general, external studies show that recycling has an environmental benefit vs mining when it comes to CO₂ . Perhaps a better way of looking at it is the difference between the units of CO₂ required to mine a unit of metal and the CO₂ required to recycle it. Here the savings are significant. The CO₂ footprint is limited, and there is not a lot of CO₂ / weight.’

Manufacturers are re-purposing batteries to power street lights and back up elevators

Life cycle emissions

The processes involved in manufacturing a battery are