What happens to all the dead electric-car batteries?

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/millions-electric-cars-are-coming-what-happens-all-dead-batteries

by rbanffy • 5 years ago

167 305 5 years ago

space_rock• 5 years ago

Is the view that this is a problem from memories of lead acid batteries in combustion vehicles? I might be ignorant but I can't see lithium batteries being a big problem

mlatu• 5 years ago

I think this is a viewed as a problem due to the sheer amount of batteries neccessary to equip all those cars.

Maybe think less in terms of used lead acid batteries but used car tires instead?

though even those are refurbished nowadays.. :shrug:

Ensorceled2• 5 years ago

The point is, the lithium will be recycled NOT that lithium batteries are less toxic than lead batteries.

Worrying about "dead" lithium batteries is like worrying about "dead" aluminum cans ...

sokoloff2• 5 years ago

Lead acid batteries are heavily recycled, with around 80% of lead used in the US coming from a recycled source, which is surely more than tires many of which end up in landfills or ground into a secondary use not as useful as a tire.

Lead acid battery recycling is not always done as a relatively clean, industrial process in other parts of the world.

throwaway0a5e• 5 years ago

Lead acid batteries are highly recyclable. People just are unable to think rationally about certain toxic substances and assume that they just have to be stored away from everything Yucca Mountain style.

cyrksoft2• 5 years ago

The article talks about lithium batteries and says that they are not economocially efficient to recycle so they are not recycled. Given the scale of lithium batteries needed for electric cars (particuarly if they are going to replace internal combustion cars) is going to be probelmatic.

tpmx• 5 years ago

~40x more mass per car is one factor.

mavhc2• 5 years ago

Without charging the creators of products the total cost to create and dispose of the product the incentives are always wrong.

Charge oil companies for the cost of removing their product from the atmosphere after it's been burnt, and charge battery companies the cost of mining pollution and recycling

rbanffy• 5 years ago

Not only that: the fossil fuel industry should also shoulder the burden it creates to the healthcare systems. We can’t just ignore the externalities.

vbezhenar• 5 years ago

How much does it cost to get one year of life from an average citizen? How would one estimate that? Healthcare system does not heal an ill person to 100% of health, it just tries to prevent death or most ill conditions.

I would even argue that it's possible to increase pollutions so more people would die and burden on healthcare systems would be reduced because of that. Weird argument, but still.

tiahura3• 5 years ago

Does the logic go both ways? Should the fossil fuel industry be rewarded for the benefits it creates for the healthcare system?

lrem• 5 years ago

When will we know the cost of recycling batteries at scale?

goodpoint• 5 years ago

THIS. In many legal systems companies are required to pay to recycle their waste. And recycling is expensive.

This created huge incentives for criminal organizations. Sketchy recycling companies that dodge regulations, bury toxic waste into building foundations, and make huge profits.

Also, most companies in developed countries simply offshore polluting industrial processes to less rich countries.

metters• 5 years ago

Also, most companies in developed countries simply offshore polluting industrial processes to less rich countries.

Exactly what shocked me when I heard about all the plastic rubbish shipped to Malaysia. Shocked, because I was kinda proud how much rubbish we sort (Germany) only to be put into a container and sent around the globe...

Not that I wasn't aware of all the electronic waste shipped to Africa to be burnt and scavenged. It just made me a bit more cynical. Our politicians really couldn't care less, if it wasn't for the votes.

kwhitefoot2• 5 years ago

In Norway the producer or importer must pay an environmental fee (miljøgebyr) that finances the infrastructure for recycling of things like batteries, tyres, etc.

7952• 5 years ago

At some point you still need to make someone responsible for disposal. And they may act improperly whatever the economic model adopted. Ultimately we need well run countries with laws and enforcement. And a culture that supports that.

SocratesV• 5 years ago

This. Externalities need to become accounted for when we want to completely evaluate the cost of an activity.

Just because those companies or us as individuals don't need to pay for the future damage, doesn't mean that cost doesn't exist, and by not accounting the externalities, the consumption of said products is incentivised since they become "cheaper" than alternatives that are presented to the end user with a higher cost.

onlyrealcuzzo• 5 years ago

Wouldn't it make more sense to just tax imported metals and miners in the US - for the externalities of mining metals - than to tax battery makers specifically?

mavhc2• 5 years ago

Tax everyone for making anything. And if a country doesn't sign up, tax their imports.

Also means they're all incentivised to invent cheaper ways of cleaning the planet.

npsimons4• 5 years ago

I am actually very much in favor of this, mostly because I believe the true cost of FF is orders of magnitude higher than the lifetime cost of batteries. Just the cost of deaths from burning FFs alone would make using them as fuel unfeasible.

Also, it'd be nice to do this all the way down the line, then maybe we'd finally see the legislation implemented for disposable packaging that the "Keep America Beautiful" propaganda was designed to counter[0].

[0] https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec...

touristtam• 5 years ago

The only "issue" is the cost will passed down to consumers.

mothsonasloth2• 5 years ago

I tell you what happens, like other electrical components:

1. Batteries ripped out of cars

2. Sold to "unscrupulous" scrap dealers

3. Put on boats to Phillipines or West Africa

4. Crushed and pounded with a rock by a 10 year old child, then burned in a rudimentary smelter to separate metals from plastics.

5. Extracted metals bought by middlemen

6. Metals certified as being safely mined/sourced

7. Re-manufactured into a car battery

Battery powered cars are going to be the next disaster, after the fibre glass disposal scandal of wind farms.

I'll keep my very efficient Audi diesel car (79g/km CO2) for now thanks.

jurip• 5 years ago

Is the fibre glass thing actually a disaster? According to this Bloomberg article https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb... it sounds more like something that would be nice to reduce but is pretty far from a disaster:

“Wind turbine blades at the end of their operational life are landfill-safe, unlike the waste from some other energy sources, and represent a small fraction of overall U.S. municipal solid waste,” according to an emailed statement from the group. It pointed to an Electric Power Research Institute study that estimates all blade waste through 2050 would equal roughly .015% of all the municipal solid waste going to landfills in 2015 alone.

pfdietz3• 5 years ago

The idea that wind turbine blades need to be recycled is more of a fetish than a requirement.

Malic• 5 years ago

It does appear there is a solution for this on the way. https://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-science/wind-turbine-mak...

TL;DR: It appears Vestas is partnering up with another company to bring to market a process to break down the epoxy resins that bind the fiberglass in the blades. The resulting base chemicals are useful for the production of further resins and new windmill blades. This process could be useful in other industries.

toss1• 5 years ago

Yes, this is considered a problem, but not a disaster.

As wind blades multiply and start to age out, this is already being worked on very strongly in the composites industry, and there are major breakthroughs[e.g., 1,2]. This should not be a disaster in the future

[1] https://electrek.co/2021/04/26/a-scottish-university-finds-n...

[2] https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1716110/vestas-deve...

ArcFeind• 5 years ago

Can turbine blades be used as sunken fake reefs? They're big and hollow, could be a good place to nuture nature?

dmitryminkovsky3• 5 years ago

4. Crushed and pounded with a rock by a 10 year old child, then burned in a rudimentary smelter to separate metals from plastics.

https://youtu.be/wzJI8gfpu5Y?t=2317, cue children at https://youtu.be/wzJI8gfpu5Y?t=2364

iExploder• 5 years ago

exactly that. politicians and visionaries with big ideas about green future are one side of the story the other is the implementation and how it works in practice.

thrash tends to conveniently vanish into the 3rd world or east europe, where it gets burned or poisons the environment.

Ddkkjfj2• 5 years ago

People are aware of this bit it doesn't fit in the narrative for ev Akkus.

Those are not broke after 5-10 year of usage. Small cells might be broken but replaceable and if not used for cars we still can and will use them for power storage.

And then we can recycle them.

908B64B1972• 5 years ago

I'm surprised they have not built a permanent fire pit at least or a furnace with a chimney so the harmful fumes aren't at ground level.

StavrosK5• 5 years ago

Battery powered cars are going to be the next disaster
I'll keep my very efficient Audi diesel car (79g/km CO2) for now thanks.

"Battery powered cars are a small disaster, so I'll keep my big disaster instead".

daniellarusso• 5 years ago

It uses waste vegetable oil.

volta835• 5 years ago

Are they the small disaster ? What do you think is going to happen with all the lithium after being bounded by a 10 year old with a rock?

Probably just going to land in the river, and then the sea.

ninjamayo2• 5 years ago

...which will go through a similar disassembly process and also pollute the environment for as long as it lives.

paulcole• 5 years ago

The good thing is that there are going to be so many disasters that the car battery disposal disaster will likely get lost in the shuffle.

Full disclosure: I am long TSLA.

rhaps0dy2• 5 years ago

fibre glass disposal scandal of wind farms

What's the problem with burying blades in a landfill? They don't degrade, OK, but rocks also don't degrade.

- They're too big to drift to the ocean and be ingested by animals, which is the problem with plastic objects.

- They don't leak nasty stuff into the groundwater, because landfills are lined properly to prevent that. Also fibreglass is pretty much inert.

squarefoot2• 5 years ago

Do fiberglass degrade to a point it can't be recycled? We already use it for multiple things, from boats to PCBs, so there would be quite a big market. Any reasons why it shouldn't or couldn't be recycled?

legutierr2• 5 years ago

It seems rather inefficient for the batteries to be shipped overseas and for their materials to be extracted by 10 year olds, rather than to just have the batteries be recycled in the country where they are used.

actually_a_dog• 5 years ago

There aren't any 10 year olds in Western countries who are available to do the work.

More seriously, global shipping at scale is ridiculously cheap. This site currently shows a rate of $987 to ship a 20' container from NYC to Jakarta: https://www.icontainers.com/ship-container/indonesia/

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

but it's cheaper

sect2k• 5 years ago

Because it's cheaper to have them shipped to a third world country, where there is little to no environmental regulation and worker protection, then the alternative.

lmilcin4• 5 years ago

While I agree this scenario is representative to what is likely to happen if nobody reacts, I don't agree that it must necessarily happen or that is a reason to stay on petrol cars.

The difference between batteries and petrol is that batteries can be reprocessed. The problem is unless we do something (set up regulation) it is likely the unregulated way in which it is going to happen will cost a huge pollution and suffering.

Think in terms of lead and lead-acid batteries specifically. There is a mandated system (at least here in EU) that tries to prevent the components of lead acid batteries to get back into environment. For example, when I want to buy a replacement battery I can't throw the old one in the trash and I am expected to exchange the old one for the new one and pay extra if I want to only buy new one without giving away the old.

Is it too hard to think we can do something like that for the huge card batteries which are much less disposable than the lead acid ones?

Clubber3• 5 years ago

Is it too hard to think we can do something like that for the huge card batteries which are much less disposable than the lead acid ones?

Who is we? I don't remember being able to vote for any politicians that are interested in this sort of thing.

Hydrogen cell cars are probably the best option for the future. It's very abundant naturally and its byproduct is H2O. We have to figure out how to mass produce it though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnzuuLpYFVg

consp• 5 years ago

For personal use yes, for professional use the "tax" is either absent or doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Considering I have plenty of "disposed" used UPS batteries laying around I'm pretty sure companies don't care. (This is in the EU)

vladvasiliu2• 5 years ago

I think the issue with this is that politicians have a tendency to think about problems only long after the fact.

For example, in the EU, they've banned some plastic single-use food containers, like straws, etc. The other day I was reading an article in a local French paper about how some organization did a study on the replacement products used and found them to be pretty terrible. Both for the environment and for the human body.

The kicker was that some of those containers were sold as being "bio-degradable" but it turned out they weren't.

Now batteries and similar are a "new" thing, so they probably didn't have enough time to think about this, but selling something as something that it's not, even if we leave aside the whole ecology thing, sounds pretty much like fraud to me. But apparently they're looking into ways of banning these, not taking up the suppliers for fraud.

ppf11• 5 years ago

The existing system with lead-acid batteries is based on the fact that they are easy to recycle, and the lead has significant value.

DominikD• 5 years ago

Good thing that German diesels had no scandals of their own! ;)

sobellian• 5 years ago

Yes and instead of employing ten year olds we get to transact with all the famously ethical and benevolent regimes that control most of the global oil supply ;)

spoiledtechie• 5 years ago

Exactly what I was going to say.

hannob2• 5 years ago

Battery powered cars are going to be the next disaster, after the fibre glass disposal scandal of wind farms.

Serious question: What is the fibre glass disposal scandal of wind farms? I googled for it and I didn't find it.

There's currently no way to recycle these, ok. They usually end up in landfills or incinerators. It's not ideal and we can hope that better technologies will come up in the future. But that's not really what I'd call a scandal.

ehnto2• 5 years ago

Surely it would be as bad that there are countless boat hulls, kayaks, canoes, surf boards, childrens playgrounds, car aero, outdoor furniture ... you get the picture. Windfarms are hardly the source of the most fibreglass and it is at least relatively inert as waste.

No green energy is truly green or perfect, but we aren't aiming for perfect we just want better.

hutzlibu2• 5 years ago

You might want to call it a scandal, if you want to find reasons of being opossed to regenerative energies in general.

Otherwise it is a mere technical problem calling for a better solution than what is avaiable right now.

mothsonasloth2• 5 years ago

Its not a scandal yet!

Because we are approaching a cliff when a lot of 1st and 2nd generation wind turbines are about to be decommissioned or refurbished.

Note: this is for Scotland.

Its bad enough a single wind turbine blade requiring a convoy escort along small winding roads for installation. Now they have to do the same and dispose them.

The cost is going to have to be paid somewhere, most likely by consumers.

Or they will be disposed off cheaply in a bad way.

ehnto2• 5 years ago

Fibre glass is far more widely spread than in windfarms. Is there a particularly troubling aspect in the way windfarms use it?

credit_guy• 5 years ago

I'll keep my very efficient Audi diesel car (79g/km CO2) for now thanks.

I did not have a point of reference to see in what sense this is efficient or not, so I checked how much CO2 humans exhale. It turns out your car emits about as much as 2 humans exhale.

Here's the math:

  - car: on average people drive about 10000 kilometers/year in the UK [1], so if you drive like an average person in the UK, your car puts out 790 kg of CO2 in a year

  - humans: on average people exhale about 2.3 pounds of CO2 per day [2]. That makes about 762 kg/year for 2 people

[1]https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/americans-drive-more-dy...

[2] https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/waiting-exhale

oddeyed• 5 years ago

Not necessarily comparable for purposes of global heating effect (not sure if that's what you're doing or not).

The CO2 that a human exhales is from the carbon in the food they consume. That carbon ultimately comes (whether indirectly via animals or not) from plants, which drew that CO2 out of the air directly, typically at most a few years prior. The net change in CO2 concentration is zero.

Contrast this to burning fossil fuels which moves carbon from places where it is not enhancing the greenhouse effect (e.g. it's in coal, gas wells or crude oil) into the atmosphere where it will cause global heating - a net increase in CO2 concentration.

As a side note, methane produced by livestock or food waste does still have a global heating effect as CH4 is a more "potent" greenhouse gas than CO2, so there is a net increase in heating potential due to this conversion.

hutzlibu2• 5 years ago

What you should not forget is, that CO2 isn't the only gas emitted by diesel cars.

Gases and dust, that are a serious health hazard en masse in cities.

Also I doubt that the 79g/100km is the full number, that includes drilling for, refining and transporting that diesel to your car, before you can burn it there.

And btw., those kids in africa are poisening themself with ICE car parts too.

So I don't think anyone said, we should all wreck our ice cars today and go all electric immediately. That clearly makes no sense ressource wise.

But in the long run, yes. I want noise, smoke, fumes and dust free cities as soon as possible, along with a somewhat stable and intact environment. You have to start somewhere.

imtringued5• 5 years ago

For humans to breathe out CO2, they must eat animals or plants. Animals also eat plants. Plants obtain carbon from the atmosphere by capturing CO2.

Of course I am ignoring CO2 emissions caused by industrial agriculture and those should not be understated but breathing alone doesn't contribute any net CO2, it's the industrial process that does it.

Workaccount2• 5 years ago

Humans emit recycled CO2

Cars emit new CO2

CAT0• 5 years ago

Not in the EU. The Batteries Regulation signed the December 10th 2020 aims to ensure that batteries placed in the EU market are sustainable and safe throughout their entire life cycle.

https://ec.europa.eu/environment/topics/waste-and-recycling/...

BiteCode_dev• 5 years ago

I get that this is a problem, but comparing it to oil as being the better alternative is not convincing: oil have been at the center of terrible wars, corruptions and ecological disasters for decades. Entire populations have been displaced, robbed, poisoned, conned and/or killed for oil. Let's not pretend it comes with less suffering attached, not to mention we had almost a century to improve the process, and we are comparing it to electrical cars, something that had been barely marketable to the public for 10 years.

worldsayshi• 5 years ago

Battery powered cars are going to be the next disaster, after the fibre glass disposal scandal of wind farms.
I'll keep my very efficient Audi diesel car (79g/km CO2) for now thanks.

Why are you framing this as being a particular problem for electric cars and wind farms? It sounds like a problem that encompasses all of global trade, manufacturing and modern technology.

ppf11• 5 years ago

It sounds like a problem that encompasses all of global trade, manufacturing and modern technology.

It is, which is why it is absurd on its face that supposedly more "sustainable" solutions to transport and electricity generation increase all three of those.

gambiting2• 5 years ago

>I'll keep my very efficient Audi diesel car (79g/km CO2)

The thing is, we realized some time ago that CO2 emissions are not all that matters in a car, and your diesel is spewing very harmful NOx emissions whever you drive, plus if you haven't got a DPF(I don't know how old your car is) the amount of fine particulate matter that is proven to be dangerous to health is quite high as well.

zthrowaway• 5 years ago

Also the pollution that is created to make the batteries and also to generate the additional electricity demand on coal power plants to charge all the cars.

Auto makers are just selling the feeling of doing something good for the environment to consumers because that’s what is in vogue.

FriedrichN2• 5 years ago

I'll keep my very efficient Audi diesel car (79g/km CO2) for now thanks.

I bet that's the exact reason why you drive that exact car. Because of course the coolant, oil, acid batteries, etc. your car uses is disposed of correctly, or one of the hundreds of parts that needs replacing every X amount of time in an ICE. Never mind the waste that oil production itself causes.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/01/fossil-fuel...

New modes of transportation and energy generation will not be 100% clean and waste free, I think it would be naive to think we could actually do that. But they can be steps in the right direction.

If your cynical assumption is that we can't do it right anyway, why do you even pretend that driving your old car is somehow better? If we won't dispose of lithium batteries properly, we won't dispose of all the things your old car produces either.

ppf11• 5 years ago

Old oil is processed and re-used (as cheaper oil, or for heating). Lead-acid batteries have practically all of the lead re-used. I'm not sure where the acid itself, nor coolant, goes, but they're not the most damaging of pollutants.

one of the hundreds of parts that needs replacing every X amount of time in an ICE

Yep, it's usually one of the electronic parts, which is why I have no faith that EVs will be significantly more reliable.

ejb999• 5 years ago

>we won't dispose of all the things your old car produces either.

Which is exactly the point - we are already not properly disposing of things in the proper way (the 10 year old with a rock example), so what makes anyone think that it will be any different going forward? Why would anyone assume that corporations or government will do any better disposing of these 'new' things, when we have had 50-75 years to figure out how to safely dispose of the 'old' things and have so far failed; they end up being shipped overseas, so we pollute someone else's backyard, not our own.

sandworm1012• 5 years ago

> or one of the hundreds of parts that needs replacing every X amount of time in an ICE

Have you owned a modern ICE engine? I can count on one hand the number of parts that my three Honda engines have needed in the last 15 years (1 car, 1 motorcycle, 1 generator). Electric engines in realworld cars need replacement at basically the same or greater rates. Those parts are made out of the same materials (rubber+metal+plastic+ceramics+lubricants) as in electric cars. As for batteries, my three hondas have very recyclable lead-acid batteries that people will pay me good money for once they die. They will never see a landfill.

zip12342• 5 years ago

Also, IC cars leak chemicals like oil and gasoline into the environment. If the diesel engine is out of tune it may also not be burning as efficiently as expected.

anovikov• 5 years ago

What's wrong about it? As long as materials are not wasted.

ed_balls• 5 years ago

Audi diesel car (79g/km CO2) for now thanks

If CO2 was the problem, diesels would be fine. We would recapture CO2 in the future. The bigger problem is particulates and NOx

bumbada• 5 years ago

Not really. Batteries like AAA are already being recycled because it makes economical sense. In fact thieves steal it and need vigilance.

You are confused with "electrical components" that are mostly plastic, very hard to disassemble and not worth it economically.

A Tesla battery cost over $6000. Materials like Cobalt or Lithium are worth a lot in a concentrated form, much easier than extracting it from the mine. As technology improves, the metals in those batteries are worth more.

So what is going to happen is:

Short term: people will use their old car batteries for electrical network support.

Medium term: Governments are going to require recycling protocols like they already do with ICEs cars.

Long term: Companies will develop protocols to recycle it. A battery is the same thing repeated hundreds of times. The individual cells are standardized,and platforms will be shared between different manufacturers, that makes it way easier to recycle.

sokoloff2• 5 years ago

Batteries like AAA are already being recycled because it makes economical sense.

Are they? My depleted AAA alkalines go straight in the trash (which is the direction of our fairly green-friendly city of Cambridge, MA).

* - https://www.cambridgema.gov/Services/householdhazardouswaste...

Ddkkjfj2• 5 years ago

You mean that right?

Like you really think a big Akku from a ev is economically so irrelevant that we will ship it to Africa?

Fixing them (if a cell is broken) is easy and we can use them for 10 years more.

No one will just give it away and I bet that in Africa they would fix cells and use it for energy storage as well.

Your car is not just shitty for our climate your exhaust is also polluting the air we breathe

moondistance• 5 years ago

They will increasingly go to Li-Cycle [1] and similar. The tech is still not perfect, but it's much better than the historical norm.

[1] https://li-cycle.com/

ByronFortescue• 5 years ago

Similar company in this space, very promising, saw it in action and it's quite simple in essence but very scalable because of that. https://www.relectrify.com/

wiz21c• 5 years ago

Keeping your car much longer is actually a good idea : the more you keep it the less likely you'll buy another one. Not buying a car looks like the best solution to me.

dpierce9• 5 years ago

I don’t think your carbon footprint math is right. Every liter of diesel burnt produces about 2.35Kg (a gallon produces about 20lbs) of CO2. This would imply your diesel gets 30km/liter or 70mpg which seems awfully high. Audi’s current, most efficient (US) models are less than half that. You might also care about NOx, SOx, and particulates as well. The diesel is an utter failure as far as particulates go.

KozmoNau7• 5 years ago

It could be an A2 3L, which shares the drivetrain etc. with the VW Lupo 3L, so named because it used just 3L of diesel per 100km (under ideal conditions, of course).

I don't know of any current Audis with similar repeatable fuel economy.

tibbydudeza2• 5 years ago

Crushed and pounded with a rock by a 10 year old child, then burned in a rudimentary smelter to separate metals from plastics.

Yep - e-cycling all our old iPads'/iPhones/PC's with the entire village inhaling all those toxic fumes and polluting the groundwater.

poopypoopington2• 5 years ago

Which Audi do you have?

JTbane• 5 years ago

I'll keep my very efficient Audi diesel car (79g/km CO2) for now thanks.

Diesel vehicles emit a lot more NO2, as well as particulates that damage the lungs. Sure, it's less CO2 than gasoline cars, but is it worth it for urban air quality?

BitwiseFool2• 5 years ago

If you actually want to see what these places look like, read this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agbogbloshie

tuatoru• 5 years ago

I'll keep my very efficient Audi diesel car (79g/km CO2) for now thanks.

Diesel exhaust is a concentrated source of sub-micron teratogenic particles.

You're increasing your family members' cancer risk. Against this you have a made-up fantasy.

There is every reason to believe Li-ion vehicle batteries will be recycled as effectively and safely as lead-acid vehicle batteries.

tzs• 5 years ago

4. Crushed and pounded with a rock by a 10 year old child, then burned in a rudimentary smelter to separate metals from plastics.

I'm certainly no mechanical engineering or robotics expert, but based on watching a bazillion episodes of "How It's Made", "Modern Marvels", and similar shows, I'm 99.9% sure a machine could be designed and built that can do this step cheaper and faster than a 10 year old child can.

The machine would have a higher up front cost than getting a kid from a poor country to do it so might not be economical if the amount of waste is below a certain amount but that's only a temporary situation.

rcMgD2BwE72F• 5 years ago

Yet, https://www.redwoodmaterials.com wants to build their factories as close as EV ones'. Wonder why?

seventytwo2• 5 years ago

And this is why we need a carbon tax. This “very efficient Audi” driver is also freely polluting without paying for it. There’s no reason why we should allow people to freely dump stuff into the air any more than dumping stuff on the ground should be freely allowed.

908B64B1972• 5 years ago

The real question is how much work is it to recondition the cells.

Does it need re-smelting at all?

amai• 5 years ago

You would be right if diesel would be growing on trees and be sold in every organic food.

Cosmin_C3• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, not a lot of people know about the fibre glass disposal scandal of wind farms. And even fewer people will know about batteries.

I did some napkin math with a friend of mine over coffee and we concluded that just by being brough into existence and to the showroom floor a BMW i3 is equivalent from a pollution point of view to my diesel Ford having done 200.000 miles (I'm nowhere near that).

But people buy electric vehicles in droves since they're government subsidized and what not - albeit this is another bait and switch, it's not forever and charging isn't free either, plus quality overall is quite lacking, not to mention the OTA updates and potential data mining coming from these cars being oversized smartphones with wheels.

I dread the moment governments will up and force everybody to give up their old but reliable and not really hardcore polluting cars - a petrol/diesel vehicle doesn't do anything when it's off even if it's been like that for 20-30 years, an electric car may require to be always plugged in, trickle charging to keep the battery fed so in the winter you don't go to your garage and find out your range is actually 1/2 of what was expected. Not to mention nobody actually knows how long electric vehicles really last, whilst it's not uncommon for people having had the same ICE car for 30+ years.

thinkcontext2• 5 years ago

... we concluded that just by being brough into existence and to the showroom floor a BMW i3 is equivalent from a pollution point of view to my diesel Ford having done 200.000 miles (I'm nowhere near that).

Did it ever occur to you that maybe someone had looked into this before? Actually, lots of someones with PHDs have and find the opposite of you. Not only that companies are staking $10Bs on developing EVs, do you think they haven't looked at this either? Does that make you curious enough to read what they have written and see if perhaps your napkin model might not be accurate or are you content to be secure in your conclusion?

Here's a few if you are interested

https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric-vehicles-...

https://www.transportenvironment.org/sites/te/files/download...

https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/cleaner-cars-cradle-grave

vkou• 5 years ago

And how do similar components of your car get disposed of? What do you think is going to happen to its catalytic converter, for instance?

That you mention wind turbine blades leads me to think that this is less about being ethically conscious, and more about having a ciltural axe to grind against 'green' tech.

titzer• 5 years ago

I was right there with you until this:

diesel car

Just a little reminder, the planet's gonna be on fire if we don't reach carbon neutrality ASAP.

jaimehrubiks• 5 years ago

Let's send them to mars

nelsonic• 5 years ago

Bloomberg did a great QuickTake on electric car battery recycling: https://youtu.be/xtVE1I1SoRw

1. Use them for energy storage 2. Automated battery recycling 3. Use recovered materials to make new batteries

apexalpha2• 5 years ago

No1 seems to be a good solution, although it just postpones the recycling phase.

If a Tesla Model S battery dips below 70% capacity, you can easily remove it from the car and reuse the individual battery packs in 2 or 3 home battery solutions. People don't need a super performant battery that holds 100kWh for their homes, 15kWh will probably do.

goldenkey• 5 years ago

It's a huge fire hazard, isn't it? Would require a Class III extinguisher to put out IIRC.

skohan• 5 years ago

Isn't the scarcity of Lithium also a major problem? It's already an expensive commodity, how could it possibly scale to replace all the internal combustion engines even in the US for example?

FridayoLeary4• 5 years ago

Shh. Don't tell anyone.

fogihujy• 5 years ago

As for the scale of replacement, I think there are many who don't realise how major the shift from ICE to electrical will be. We're talking about large changes in everything from critical national infrastructure, the job market, long-term plans for national defense, the environment, public transport, voter approval ratings, food production, and the list just keeps on going. There's a large number of ifs, buts and maybes involved, and lithium availability is just a small piece of that.

All this is supposed to happen within the next 15 years, at least according to quite a few politicians.

Increased lithium prices is a good thing since it means that recycling will be financially viable once prices of freshly mined-lithium increases.

slfnflctd• 5 years ago

I think there are many who don't realise how major the shift from ICE to electrical will be

Could not agree more. With all the things we're talking about using batteries for (electrifying almost all wheeled transport and some aviation, huge amounts of grid storage to smooth out rough solar & wind inputs, grid-independent installations), this is going to be an absolutely massive, sprawling industry.

Batteries are likely to be a bottleneck for a long time. We will find ways to reuse and recycle the ones from old cars because there will be enormous incentives to do so.

The downside to this is that I'm not expecting battery prices to really drop much for quite a while. They may even go up. These aren't microchips after all; the laws of physics prohibit any significant miniaturization.

kwhitefoot2• 5 years ago

Lithium is not scarce. It is more abundant than lead.

"At 20 mg lithium per kg of Earth's crust,[45] lithium is the 25th most abundant element." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium)

" lead's relatively high crustal abundance of 14 ppm; it is the 38th most abundant element in the crust." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead)

The problem is that easily mined high concentration deposits of lithium are rare so it is expensive to extract.

Some of the high price can be simply attributed to high demand occurring after a period of demand low enough that mines were closed in North America. Now that demand is high there is pressure to develop new mines in the US; see, for instance, https://qz.com/1975325/electric-cars-are-fueling-the-uss-lit....

In theory we can extract vast amounts from seawater we just need enough energy.

See, for instance, https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/seawater-could-provi..., https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsmaterialslett.0c00385, https://www.samcotech.com/is-it-possible-to-extract-lithium-....

audunw3• 5 years ago

The Lithium scarcity scare reminds me of all the peak oil hysteria (which I'll admit I succumbed to as a teenager.. 2009 being doomsday back around 2004 I think). You can't use existing reserves as an indicator. If there's a higher need for lithium, more companies will look for it, more will be discovered and more mines will open. Probably prices will go down eventually due to economies of scale and new mining techniques (see Teslas battery day presentation for example)

tonyedgecombe4• 5 years ago

Cobalt is probably a bigger problem.

robomartin5• 5 years ago

Batteries are, thankfully, a longer time horizon problem. In my opinion the real question is about power generation. Unless we get serious about fast-tracking next-generation nuclear, I don't think we can support a massive deployment of electric vehicles. Or, put a different way, the electricity will have to be generated by burning even more coal than the baseline. Wind and hydro are not an option, as there's a strong limit function on expanding capacity. While solar sounds great it has its own set of issues, including a narrow generation region (both geographical and time-of-day) that would require a massive deployment of batteries to even out. This, in turn, would also require a hard look at the environmental effects caused by the manufacturing of these technologies at scale.

And then there's the question of energy conversion efficiency. Let's start from the principle that all conversion of energy happens at < 100% efficiency. A switching power supply of automotive class is likely in the 85% efficient, maybe less. Power generation itself is less than 100% efficient. And, finally, charging isn't 100% efficient.

Efficiency math for a chain of devices is simple, just multiply the efficiencies of each device in the chain to obtain the system efficiency.

If power generation efficiency is 80%; charger station another 80% and battery charging (the battery stores less than 100% of the energy that goes into it) 80%, the total system efficiency is 0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8 = 0.5 or 50%. Yikes!

In other words, HALF the energy used to charge an electric vehicle is wasted, likely as heat. That's assuming it is a three step process.

The truth is there are additional links in the chain. For example, the transmission of electricity though power lines and transformers isn't 100% efficient. In California we are at about 90% [0]. This would bring my prior estimate down to about 45%.

I would not be surprised if a full accounting of losses, from generation to energy stored in a battery, is in the 30% range. From that to energy-in-battery to energy delivered to the wheels is a different matter. Maybe 90%?

I haven't seen a study analyzing the realities of mass electric vehicle deployment from an energy efficiency perspective. Does such a study exist?

EDIT: The real question needs to look at deployment at scale. We have about 300 million vehicles in the US. Assuming all of them are replaced with electrics and accounting for generation-to-wheel losses, how much new energy generation would we require? Other than burning coal and natural gas, how do we get there? I suspect electrics are not even close to being as "green" as people think they are. They sure feel good because, locally, in front of your own eyes, they feel clean. However, the real evaluation has to take into account the entire system.

[0] http://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how-...

hannob2• 5 years ago

The big advantage of solar compared to next-generation nuclear is that it actually exists.

robomartin5• 5 years ago

We have known how to build better, safer nuclear for quite some time. That’s what “next generation” means to me.

Tycho• 5 years ago

I heard someone say that to run all the cars in the US on electricity would require building a new nuclear power plant something like every week for the next 10 or 15 years. Is this true? I think this is completely unacceptable. The risks of nuclear accident are too great. The competence required to safely operate nuclear power plants is a limited and possibly dwindling resource.

tonyedgecombe4• 5 years ago

Is this true?

No. In the UK the National Grid says we only need to go back to 2002 levels of power generation to support the whole fleet moving to electric.

jeffbee• 5 years ago

Efficiency is a pointless exercise when your inputs are free and infinite, as is the case for solar power.

robomartin5• 5 years ago

Solar is far from being free to harvest and it is definitely finite at the local level. We are not talking about the universe, to someone living in Alaska solar is very finite, in fact, it's useless.

By that way of thinking petroleum, nuclear, natural gas, wind, etc., are free and infinite at a human scale. They are not. Each of this has finite costs, direct and indirect consequences of deployment at scale. And because no energy conversion process is 100% efficient, each of them has consequences related to the fact that waste --most often in the form of heat-- will be generated as an unavoidable part of the conversion process.

We can't look at electric cars with innocent idealistic eyes and think they are the solution to all of our problems just because they don't have a tail pipe. They do, in fact, have an exhaust pipe, it just happens to be distributed across the entire energy and materials supply chain.

I am very much pro electric transportation. I simply don't like the idea of not being honest about what it is and what it is not. Utopia it is not.

imtringued5• 5 years ago

Wind and hydro are not an option, as there's a strong limit function on expanding capacity.

Yeah, because we need batteries to charge our car batteries...

EDIT: The real question needs to look at deployment at scale. We have about 300 million vehicles in the US. Assuming all of them are replaced with electrics and accounting for generation-to-wheel losses, how much new energy generation would we require?

You said energy generation, not electricity generation. It would require negative new primary energy generation because efficiency gains alone will reduce the amount of primary energy you have to waste on waste heat production.

robomartin5• 5 years ago

Not sure I understand your second comment. While I did say “energy generation” I think it is well understood the intent was to speak about electricity generation. Besides, we cant actually generate energy, only convert it from one form to another, always wasting some in the process.

FridayoLeary4• 5 years ago

I know; the magic fairys who normally 'sort out' our rubbish will magically make the batteries disappear! It really is that simple, and we can all continue living a life of peace and tranquility.

natch6• 5 years ago

JB Straubel, cofounder and former CTO of Tesla, and someone who knows a thing or two about this, has set up a company to solve this problem.

Unfortunately I’m not surprised the article fails to mention him.

DoingIsLearning2• 5 years ago

has set up a company to solve this problem.

It's not a problem, it's in fact a huge business.

The negative tone of the comments feels like a an old car salesman trying to sell you a diesel engine instead of an EV.

An old EV battery pack is still incredibly valuable both for second hand usage in renewables (An old EV battery is not 'dead' just not performant enough for vehicle use) and recycling materials (Lithium is incredibly difficult to mine).

npsimons4• 5 years ago

The negative tone of the comments feels like a an old car salesman trying to sell you a diesel engine instead of an EV.

Considering the top comment when I got here was almost exactly that, I'm not surprised one bit. There's a lot of money to be lost by the FF and ICE industries.

wolfi1• 5 years ago

Lithium is incredibly difficult to mine

Do you have any source for that? My impression was that it is relatively easy to mine but not economical enoguh

natch6• 5 years ago

It's not a problem, it's in fact a huge business

Thanks for pointing this out. Pretty important point!

alkonaut3• 5 years ago

So long as recycling is cheaper than creating new products, this problem should take care of itself.

The environmental problem seems worse for products that are cheaper and easier to produce from scratch, than to recycle.

The gigafactories that pop up around the world right now contain recycling lines to feed the battery production.

alkonaut3• 5 years ago

Edit: I meant to say “in winter”, usually the fraction of exotic fuels in diesel is smaller in winter.

hellbannedguy• 5 years ago

These batteries are lasting longer than thought.

Sure, the wealthy boys will swap out for the best cells, but most of us will ride until it dies.

I have a feeling this might not be the problem we are expecting.

pornel2• 5 years ago

The batteries will have a second life even after they're completely useless for cars. They can be used as grid storage for solar power. The Duck Curve makes such batteries valuable even when they're not very efficient. Poor capacity/weight ratio doesn't matter when they are sitting on the ground.

kybernetyk2• 5 years ago

I wonder what happens to the used car market. When the battery is pretty much borked a used car is of no use. And replacing the battery would be way too expensive for many people who rely on used cars.

pornel2• 5 years ago

One option used currently is battery leasing. When you buy an electric Renault Zoe, they don't sell you the battery.

kybernetyk2• 5 years ago

So what happens with that leasing contract when you sell your car?

audunw3• 5 years ago

I haven't heard of batteries dying on old EVs being a problem. Usually battery pack replacement is due to faulty cells from production, which manifests during the warranty period most of the time. I know degradation was a problem with old Nissan Leafs, since they had no proper cooling, compounded by the fact that they started with a tiny battery to begin with. I've heard of replacements being done there, but a lot are still driving around with the original battery 10 years later.

I'm pretty sure we could still use our EV for daily driving with 70% degradation (of 30kWh), since we can charge in our garage. Probably more reliable than an old ICE car too.

The bigger the original battery, the higher the degradation can be tolerated without the car being useless. So the problem will decrease over time. There is also a big focus on long-lasting batteries in battery R&D for EVs. Ref Teslas million mile battery/drivetrain.

Some EVs also make it possible to replace individual cells or submodules of the battery. Though I haven't heard of that being done in the real world yet.

Remember that if you DO replace the battery, you can get a car that's pretty much as good as new with regards to the drivetrain. The inverter and motor is likely to outlast the car anyway. It may even be better than new, in terms of range, if the replacement battery has a higher capacity, which could be possible if replacements are made with a next-generation battery technology.

tonyedgecombe4• 5 years ago

I know degradation was a problem with old Nissan Leafs

It's still a problem, the current model still has no active battery temperature management. Strangely their vans do so I'm not sure why the cars don't.

WorldMaker3• 5 years ago

So far the used car market for EVs is fascinating. Right now the mean "first owner" life of an EV still seems to be triple that of an ICE vehicle. An average EV owner is keeping the car for closer to 9 years compared to the 3 year average turnover of ICE vehicles that has been a used car market staple for decades. (A lot of used car dealers would hope this statistic would decline as we have moved past the earliest of early adopters to more "mainstream" buyers, but so far there are no indications of this shifting.) Because of that EVs are holding their market prices more stable over time than ICE vehicles as they age and there's a lot fewer EVs on the used car market to judge any clear statistics just yet.

The market prices may seem to be reflecting that overall reliability of an EV is much higher than comparable ICE vehicles as they age and that so far battery degradation hasn't been a market issue. Though again, that may still be some bias from much, much smaller sample sizes to date.

What we do know is that of the EVs entering the used market, very few show noticeable signs of battery degradation (again, at 9 years on average!). Most of the ones with very noticeable battery degradation are Nissan Leafs. Most of those are still getting resold at decent prices (compared to equivalently aged ICE vehicles) and as cars to new owners (often as a second commuter car for a household some of these statistics suggest) and expected to still be on the roads a surprising number of years even after "noticeable degradation".

Some of the earliest of these degraded batteries were still under lease from Nissan, as Nissan for the first few years of Leaf sales had a battery lease model, and Nissan hasn't released statistics but admitted "surprise" that very few of the leases have been called in and most people still prefer to drive the Leafs as-is "degraded battery" or not rather than release the batteries to secondary usage. Nissan had plans for a project like Tesla's PowerWall for secondary life batteries (only; Tesla sells PowerWalls built from entirely newly sourced batteries), but claims so far they've yet to receive back enough batteries to build a single one even given how notably "degraded" their batteries have as a reputation in the used market.

All of which is to say that current indicators are that EVs seem to be on the road with their original batteries right now statistically for 15+ years even most of the "most degraded" ones the used market has seen to date. Replacing the batteries hasn't seemed to be an issue that has manifested yet in the used market. Though that extra reliability currently seems to come at a cost in the used market for the people who rely on cheap used cars because the cars seem likely to remain more expensive than ICE vehicles as that first owner statistic alone likely keeps the prices compared to age higher, but the overall reliability also may be keeping the prices high.

podgaj• 5 years ago

Who cares? It's GREEN($)!

Please people, it is just another industry within consumer capitalism. They externalize all the nasty bits so all the dopes can feel good about driving a Tesla.

nullifidian• 5 years ago

I think there is money in using modern robotics for automatic recycling of batteries. There are millions of cars but probably only hundreds of battery module types in the coming decades. So certifying a recycling algorithm for a new module type shouldn't be a difficult task, and wouldn't require retooling.

carapace3• 5 years ago

Not just researchers, wrecking yards are dealing with this problem today. I've read that wrecked EVs have to be isolated because they can catch fire or even explode days after a crash!

Speaking as an environmentalist, this is a huge smack in the face. Electric cars are supposed to be "green" but in fact it's the same old story. It just seems so short-sighted!

- - - -

Anyway...

There's got to be a better way!

And there is: alcohol fuel.

It burns clean and is carbon-neutral. Anyone can make it from anything that has starch or sugar. It's non-toxic(-ish).

carapace3• 5 years ago

(Lotta downvotes but y'all don't have anything to say?)

Alcohol has greater energy density than batteries; the by-products of alcohol production are organic and can be e.g. fed to animals; the exhaust of burning alcohol is non-toxic; the energy is from the sun, the molecules are from the air and water, burning the fuel is carbon-neutral because the carbon came from the atmosphere (not underground); you don't need lithium or other rare chemicals.

C'mon y'all, think it through.

mrfusion• 5 years ago

Could not a lot of these degraded batteries be moved into stationary power applications?

npsimons4• 5 years ago

Yes. I've heard this in so many places, it's kind of disappointing that a crowed normally better informed (HN) is being so reactionary about EV batteries. Oh well, guess I can toss EVs as another collective HN Dunning-Kruger domain along with diet and psychology.

squarefoot2• 5 years ago

There's an upside though: millions of combustion engine powered cars are also going, and enclosing depleted batteries remains in leak proof tanks after recycling materials seems a lot easier than doing the same with combustion engines byproducts. I don't want to sound too optimistic, as there always will be shady figures trying to profit from illegal dumps, but with proper regulation and enforcement it doesn't look like a bad deal to me.

Thorentis• 5 years ago

Also what happens to the millions of petrol cars? They won't just disappear, and won't be usable for many spare parts.

carapace3• 5 years ago

They are relatively easy to recycle, and valuable enough that "metal theft" is a thing. Remember all the rusted-out cars that folks had in their yards? They're mostly gone now.

See "Junkyard Planet; Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade" by Adam Minter, fascinating book IMO.

natmaka2• 5 years ago

Hydrovolt is establishing a ((...)) battery recycling hub in Norway, laying the foundations for a circular supply chain for electric car batteries in Europe.

https://hydrovolt.com/

qq12as• 5 years ago

Is there a good scientific/safety reason for which Tesla's batteries are held together by polyurethane cement, as opposed to something easier to deal with?

mensetmanusman• 5 years ago

They should be plugged into the grid to reduce our risk of an EMP (more likely from the sun) killing 90% of us.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/new-em...

Nature is periodic, take it seriously: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

ad• 5 years ago

“ In seven days, the over 100 nuclear power reactors run out of emergency power and go Fukushima, spreading radioactive plumes over the most populous half of the United States. ”

I didn’t see in the article, but why can’t the nuclear power plants shut down well before they ‘go Fukushima’?

JohnJamesRambo• 5 years ago

Washington Examiner looks like the landing spot for an ad you would get on Facebook. I strongly doubt 90% of the world would die from that. It would be bad sure, but humans are resourceful.

A more reasonable article-

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-studies-warn-...

DennisP2• 5 years ago

At Tesla's battery day they said they plan to recycle their own batteries, claiming it's a lot easier if you're only recycling one kind of battery.

That seems to fit well with what the article described as ideal: "direct recycling, which would keep the cathode mixture intact." I guess Tesla would have to remove their "indestructible polyurethane cement that holds [the cells] together."

bagacrap• 5 years ago

Tesla has a track record of achieving the impossible ;)

skynet-90003• 5 years ago

If they ever get to it and if it's economically feasible. Meanwhile, people are trying to buy old Tesla's and repair their batteries on their own (see numerous youtube videos), which seems very dangerous, or they just go to the junkyard.

DennisP2• 5 years ago

What I mean is, they'd probably change the cell design to use a different cement for the sake of recycling :)

gamblor956• 5 years ago

EVs have been around since the 1890s. What exactly was impossible about what Tesla accomplished?

georgefrick• 5 years ago

They get recycled? So much negativity here it's unreal, almost like there is an agenda.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLr0GStrnwQ

Black1012• 5 years ago

Hydrogen Fuel-cell cars would the best of both worlds and range wouldn't be an issue: https://in.pcmag.com/cars-auto/142675/hydrogen-powered-hyund... ... IE: No CO2 pollution, no battery pollution and no charging time issue.

rswail4• 5 years ago

Except that hydrogen production requires energy, so needs either an integrated renewable power source plus water supply or uses grid power.

There's also the impact of that water supply being diverted to hydrogen production, as well as the shipping of hydrogen.

All of that is solvable, but so is battery technology and recycling of the battery ingredients.

Black1012• 5 years ago

Except that hydrogen production requires energy

and battery charging doesn't require energy?

as well as the shipping of hydrogen

It's not very complicated to produce hydrogen where it's needed since there is usually both water and energy everywhere

tibbydudeza2• 5 years ago

The same place they send those all those unused cruise ships to.

Fascinating how they beach it and then those poor Bangladeshi's/Indians descend on it like a bunch of ants armed with only the most rudimentary tools like acetylene torches and front end loaders.

Stripping it like a dead animal until nothing remains.

agentultra• 5 years ago

Hopefully more companies like https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/batteries-storage/lithiumio... will get a big boost and recycling will take over a good portion of the source for battery materials.

And of course, reduction: investments in public infrastructure and pedestrian-based city design to reduce the need for individual ownership and the total number of cars overall.

Phenomenit• 5 years ago

According to northvolt 50 procent of the cathode material is going to be reused to make new cells and the bigger issue is that there isn't going to be enough spent batteries to recycle.

https://northvolt.com/newsroom/Announcing-Revolt

npsimons4• 5 years ago

They get recycled. Next question, and thanks for the scaremongering of a technology that irrefutably is better for the environment than the way we're currently collectively shitting all over it (ICE vehicles).

agumonkey• 5 years ago

Tbh I didn't read the article. There are operations running in Germany with recycling pods crushing batteries (powered by remain charge on other to be recycled batteries) and separating material. It was on YouTube one or two years ago. I don't know how things are evolving but it's pretty smooth already (even if scaling issue occur, its already running).

AtlasBarfed• 5 years ago

Is lithium valuable?

Is Cobalt valuable?

Is Nickel valuable?

Can a car battery be repackaged/refurbished to home energy storage?

Can a car battery be repackaged/refurbished to appliances like lawnmowers and snowblowers and power tools?

This is almost as dumb a headline as "what will we do with all the windmill blades?"

Meanwhile, there exists something called "mountaintop removal" in coal.

azinman2• 5 years ago

Just require manufacturers to recycle their own batteries. Quickly their designs will change to make it easier/cheaper for them, and you won’t need a 1-size-fits-all design via legislation.

johnkingjr• 5 years ago

Why not simply plant more trees while work from home for the majority? Indeed, a similar question was asked to Elon Musk a few weeks ago, he did not have a good answer to it to promote EV.

voisin• 5 years ago

Where are the articles asking these questions about ICE engines? Ever driven by a scrap yard?

What happens to all the dead electric-car batteries?

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