The complex, colorful puzzle of recycling EV batteries
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REGINA BARBER: You're listening to Short Wave from NPR. Hey Short Wavers. Regina Barber here with cars and energy correspondent Camila Domonoske. Camila, what are you doing here?
CAMILA DOMONOSKE: I'm here to talk about recycling-- recycling electric vehicle batteries--
BARBER: Excellent.
DOMONOSKE: --which is a huge deal. And this is really important because, as you know, electric vehicle batteries at the end of their life are a big problem. If they're not recycled, they're hazardous waste in the fire hazard sense as well as the toxic leak sense. And Gina, I talk to drivers all the time. And I hear from a lot of people who are really worried about this, and they aren't even sure if EV batteries are recyclable.
BARBER: Well, are they?
DOMONOSKE: Yes. In fact, some EV batteries are being recycled right now. But the process is fairly complicated. And a lot of these batteries are being shipped to Asia for key steps in the recycling process. Obviously, that is not super efficient.
BARBER: But Camila, I'm living proof that, even though something can be recycled, doesn't mean it will be recycled. I just threw away a cat can this morning.
DOMONOSKE: I accept your confession here in this safe space. So the thing about batteries, the minerals in them are very valuable when you're talking about a big EV battery. At the same time, right now, we are far from ideal recycling conditions here in the US that would make it so we could be sure that that process is going to happen reliably. Unless it's mandated by the government, it needs to make business sense to recycle things on a very basic level. Recycling a metal needs to be cheaper than mining it.
BARBER: It makes sense.
DOMONOSKE: So I wanted to see a company that is working on this for myself.
SPEAKER 1: The route guidance will start now.
DOMONOSKE: And I went to a battery recycling facility outside Boston, Ascend Elements.
SPEAKER 1: You have arrived at your destination.
DOMONOSKE: So at Ascend, I met Matthew Valdiviezo. He's a chemist who works in R&D at Ascend Elements. And he was standing in front of this beaker with a magnetic stir bar whizzing around at the bottom, making a whirlpool in this liquid that was an incredible bluish-greenish color.
BARBER: I love it.
DOMONOSKE: Gina, how much do you know about what's inside a lithium ion battery?
BARBER: I'm assuming lithium because it's in the name. But you also need something to get that current of electricity going in a battery.
DOMONOSKE: You actually have a whole cocktail of elements. And one very common combination is nickel, cobalt, and manganese. You add that to lithium to make one end of the battery-- the cathode. And then you have graphite as the other end-- the anode. And those are the two ends of the current flow. All these elements make Ascend's R&D lab very colorful. What's your favorite color of the various chemicals that you work with?
MATTHEW VALDIVIEZO: I would say the nickel solution. It's a very nice green.
DOMONOSKE: The graphite is black, cobalt, bright pink.
VALDIVIEZO: When we have a lot of copper impurity, it's a nice blue, but that's not what we want.
DOMONOSKE: All these colors point to the fundamental challenge of recycling an EV battery. If you're trying to recycle an aluminum can, you melt it down, and you make aluminum. But if you want to recycle a battery, you don't just have just one element.
BARBER: Right. You have the whole rainbow of them.
DOMONOSKE: Exactly. Companies here in the US have to crack this puzzle of how do you tease apart all these minerals and do it efficiently enough to be competitive with these companies overseas that have dominated this sector.
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BARBER: Today on the show-- what companies like Ascend tell us about the bigger battery picture and why recycling is kind of like wrestling with LEGO bricks. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.
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BARBER: OK, Camila, you brought us to Ascend Elements Lab and you said all those different colorful elements make it tricky to recycle a battery. So how do you recycle that battery then?
DOMONOSKE: So first, there is an older way. It basically involved burning the batteries, pyrometallurgy.
BARBER: OK, burning and batteries. I feel like those two words should be so far from each other. Like, it literally makes me cringe when you say them together.
DOMONOSKE: Yeah. And pyrometallurgy, pretty wasteful. A lot of the elements just burn away. That's how you sort them out. And as you can imagine, it makes a lot of pollution. Beatrice Browning studies battery recycling. She's a senior analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, which provides data about the whole EV battery supply chain.
BEATRICE BROWNING: As time has gone on, we realized that there's better ways to recycle batteries. So now technology has shifted towards a hydrometallurgical technique.
BARBER: OK, hydrometallurgical. OK, hydro makes me think of water, not fire or burning.
DOMONOSKE: Exactly. But not just water. In this case, we're talking about a strong acid. This is a much more efficient, cleaner way of recycling batteries. Ascend's process is a version of this. Step one for the hydrometallurgical process is collecting and pulverizing batteries. So behind the R&D lab at Ascend Elements, there is a small production line. And what goes into that line, the starting material, is this stuff called black mass.
BARBER: OK, black mass. What is that?
DOMONOSKE: It's quite a name. It's named for the color. It looks like black sand.
BRIAN GARLAND: Hang on. Let me just give you a little so you can see it.
DOMONOSKE: Brian Garland works at Ascend. And he showed me some, with the scoop.
GARLAND: That's what we get from shredding the batteries.
DOMONOSKE: And right away, this powder becomes a liquid. Eric Gratz is the co-founder and CTO of Ascend Elements. He walked me through the process.
ERIC GRATZ: Then you get pumped down to that leaching tank there where you'll be dissolved in sulfuric acid.
DOMONOSKE: From that acid, you do chemical extractions to pull elements out one by one. You precipitate them out.
BARBER: OK, so you add a chemical. Then out of the liquid, you get a solid. That's what you are trying to extract.
DOMONOSKE: Exactly. And here is where Ascend is doing things a little bit differently. Typically, what you do with this process is you pull out all of the valuable battery minerals one by one, and then you send those elements to battery plants to get put back together again.
GRATZ: So you make a nickel sulfate, a cobalt sulfate, a manganese sulfate. But that's extracting 98% of the material because you're worried about the 2% of impurities.
BARBER: Like what kind of impurities is he talking about?
DOMONOSKE: He means things like steel, copper, aluminum. There are bits of those in batteries, like on the outside.
BARBER: That you don't want.
DOMONOSKE: Right. So yeah, since the impurities are only 2% of what's in there, this standard approach is not very efficient, which is why Ascend is taking another approach.
GRATZ: So we flipped the problem around and we're extracting the 2% of impurities and keeping the nickel, manganese, and cobalt together. So not fighting thermodynamics but working with it.
BARBER: OK. So how are they working with thermodynamics? Like, you can leave pure elements all together.
DOMONOSKE: Yeah, basically the standard hydrometallurgical process, you're extracting all the stuff you want from the acidic goop. His company just extracts the little bit they don't want. Because after all, the next step is going to be combining these minerals together again. So they skip that step completely. I have a metaphor for you which helped me think about this.
BARBER: I love metaphors. Let's do this.
DOMONOSKE: This particular metaphor is inspired by my five-year-old, who is firmly in the LEGO phase.
BARBER: Phase can also last a lifetime, as my household can report.
DOMONOSKE: OK, fair enough. So imagine you have made a big LEGO creation and you would now like to make a different LEGO creation which will require most but not all of the same pieces. So you could take the thing apart brick by brick and sort them all by color and shape and then build your new creation from there.
BARBER: Yes, that is usually how it works. Well, almost always. Almost always.
DOMONOSKE: Right. So what Ascend is doing is they are not sorting all the bricks. They're taking it apart and then they're pulling out the bricks they don't want to use, but they're keeping everything that they know they'll use again in the big pile in the middle. The green nickel, the red cobalt, it all stays in there mixed together and goes right into the new battery.
BARBER: OK, I got it. So taking out 2% that you don't want instead of tediously sorting out all of the 98% you do want.
DOMONOSKE: Exactly. So that's Ascend's innovation. And they're giant plant in Kentucky right now to do this at a much larger scale. And I should note, at that plant, they will also recover the lithium from these batteries. And they are researching how to get out the graphite too in a form that's pure enough to go back into batteries also.
BARBER: So what kind of waste does this produce?
DOMONOSKE: Yeah, I asked Gratz that question.
GRATZ: So the beautiful thing about this process is we don't create waste.
DOMONOSKE: How is that possible?
GRATZ: Our chemicals, at the end of the day, get made into new products that are sold into new industries and our water is reused internally.
BARBER: Wow.
DOMONOSKE: So obviously, journalism, skeptical of comments like that, I ran it by Beatrice Browning. She said that it is, in fact, plausible, that there are potential for the various byproducts. And she also pointed out that lots of other companies are working on other innovations to make recycling even more efficient. She pointed to one in particular called direct recycling.
BROWNING: So this involves taking lithium ion battery and trying to avoid that shredding step. And by avoiding that shredding step, you can keep all the components as they are.
DOMONOSKE: So instead of shredding the battery and turning that into the black mass that I saw, the sort of black sand stuff, you keep the battery together and carefully separate sections of it. It's like instead of mixing up all the LEGO bricks, you actually keep a lot of them stuck together. You carefully pull apart your LEGO castle, but you reuse entire walls and towers.
BARBER: Wow. I'm going to keep running with this metaphor a little longer.
DOMONOSKE: Please do.
BARBER: So would that require designing the LEGO models differently in the first place?
DOMONOSKE: Yeah, that would make it a lot easier, if we designed batteries to make them easy to recycle, the same way that they're designed with safety and range and lifespan in mind. I've talked to several people who say direct recycling is still in the early stages but they see a lot of potential.
BARBER: It's cool to hear that this process is actually getting better.
DOMONOSKE: Yeah. And you know, big picture, I have talked to a lot of people about battery recycling. I've talked to EV drivers, EV skeptics, recycling companies, automakers, researchers, environmentalists. And what has really struck me is that while drivers are really concerned about batteries as waste, pretty much everyone else is really excited about old batteries as a resource.
BARBER: This sounds fascinating. Please tell me more.
DOMONOSKE: So recycling batteries keeps them out of landfills. And yes, let's be clear, that is very important. They should not be in landfills. That's a real problem. But it also makes minerals for more batteries. Now, right now, there are not very many batteries out there to recycle. Batteries last a long time. That's good news for EV drivers, like us. They can have a second life as, say, backup power for a home. That's also good news. But eventually, in a few decades, we are inevitably going to have a lot of batteries that need to be recycled. And the more of them we recycle, the less we need to mine. Mining these minerals takes energy. It disrupts habitats and communities. It is way too often associated with abuses and pollution above and beyond that. That is a very real cost to building EVs. But once these minerals are mined, through recycling they can be used again and again and again, which is a huge advantage over gasoline and diesel.
BARBER: Right. A barrel of oil is a one-time use thing.
DOMONOSKE: Yes, very much so. So environmental groups, like Earthworks, very critical of mining operations, they actually point to recycling and say, we don't need as many mines as you think. Then you have automakers and battery makers who are excited about this as source of these minerals. So to people who are worried about batteries, yes, batteries are hazardous waste if you waste them. But if you recycle them-- well, Gina, you know what they say about one person's trash--
BARBER: Is my treasure?
DOMONOSKE: Not quite.
BARBER: But, hey, listen, I enjoyed this time with you. It was a pleasure, Camila. And it was a treasure.
DOMONOSKE: It was a joy to be here, Gina.
BARBER: Before we head out, if you liked this episode, make sure to follow us if you haven't already. That way, you'll never miss a new episode. And if you liked this episode, check out our episodes on nuclear fusion and the future of clean energy storage. We'll link them in our show notes. This episode was produced by Rebecca Ramirez and edited by Jessica Yung. It was fact checked by Tyler Jones, and the audio engineer was Kwesi Lee. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Collin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.
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