What happens to used electric car batteries?

https://www.wired.com/story/cars-going-electric-what-happens-used-batteries/

by liellesch • 5 years ago

101 81 5 years ago

wired.com

desktopninja2• 5 years ago

Used batteries will be big business: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29090924

I'm also willing to bet that this will become a high value item for property theft.

esturk• 5 years ago

Unlike a catalytic converter which is lightweight and easy to steal, the battery of an EV is neither. Heck, even a PHEV like the Prius has a battery that weighs 150+ lbs. And as the range on these vehicles increase, so too will the weight.

minetest2048• 5 years ago

I don't see any way to steal electric car battery without actually stealing the car. Its big, heavy, scary (and actually dangerous), and highly integrated with the car

zardo• 5 years ago

Unless the car is designed for fast battery swaps.

It's still a big heavy item to steal, but it's conceivable to drop it on a skate and hoist it into a van.

withinboredom• 5 years ago

People don’t seem to have any issues stealing 600lb motorcycles

desktopninja2• 5 years ago

Definitely not the current versions of batteries but those will drop in size over a short period of time. Maybe instead of stealing the battery itself the energy from it would be illegitimately transferred off ... "siphoned off" if you will

catlikesshrimp4• 5 years ago

I think the big bussiness opportunity is bankruptcy.

Lease some land, build a cheap warehouse, stock batteries for profit. Go bankrupt

Put batteries in a ship, dump them in international waters. Go bankrupt.

Sell them abroad as "refurbished" stock. Go bankrupt. This one actually works for expired batteries, you can buy them on ebay.

ecpottinger3• 5 years ago

Contact RV, off-the grid people, people with projects that need the batteries - PROFITS! Only the dumb people can't make a profit off selling BEV batteries.

willvarfar• 5 years ago

As thieves steal cars and trucks and boats and things, I’m guessing car batteries or stealing vehicles for their batteries would be a thing.. except for DRM.

I think it’s highly likely that batteries will be like printer cartridges and a battery taken from one car won’t just work in another etc.

neonate• 5 years ago

https://archive.md/h9x9g

http://web.archive.org/web/20211104055631/https://www.wired....

russellbeattie3• 5 years ago

We need legislation immediately which requires that all new batteries are designed and made to be disassembled for recycling both easily and cheaply. Do it now, while the industry is ramping up so the costs can be built into the system.

Also, every battery that is produced should have a serial number on it. These are not things that can just be dumped in a hole and forgotten. The manufacturer of that battery should be responsible for it from the day it's made to the day it's recycled.

Side note: You know those Tide Pod plastic buckets? Those are recyclable. The refill bags of pods, however, are made of a plastic that is not recyclable - so you buy the bag to create less waste and actually end up creating more. This is the sort of stupidity that shouldn't be legally allowed in the future.

rightbyte• 5 years ago

The automaker should be responsible for recycling their batteries to allign incentives.

Imagine trying to dissassemble a 20 yo EV battery with rust and salt bridges everywhere and not die in the process.

_ph_2• 5 years ago

At least in the EU, car manufacturers have to take back old cars at no costs already.

landemva• 5 years ago

USA exports used solar panels for disposal in trash dumps 'over there'. The entire lifecycle of electric usage is important and easily overlooked.

Be precise with legislation. For example, some States forbid landfill of whole tires. This led to collection of per-tire disposal fee and the landfills purchasing new wheel loader to scoop whole tires into new shredder which uses new conveyor to pile up the tire shreds. Wheel loader then scoops shreds and sprinkles the shreds into landfill.

catlikesshrimp4• 5 years ago

Is that a loophole in the law? You can't dispose of tires but if you shred them, they are no longer tires, and you can now dispose of them?

beering• 5 years ago

Side note: You know those Tide Pod plastic buckets? Those are recyclable. The refill bags of pods, however, are made of a plastic that is not recyclable - so you buy the bag to create less waste and actually end up creating more.

Are those buckets recyclable as in "stamped with the recycling symbol" or "actually will get recycled if you drop it in the recycling bin"? I've heard that most plastics, recyclable or not, are not recycled in practice due to cost, contamination, or lack of demand. (If that's true, then the bag is better than the bucket because it's less plastic.)

russellbeattie3• 5 years ago

I actually just looked it up, and it's even more complicated, of course... From their website:

• The tub is recyclable. Please ensure that your area's recycling programs support the recycling of this type of container.

• The lid component is recyclable only in the few communities that have recycling programs for this type of material.

• The bag is not recyclable.

https://pgconsumersupport.secure.force.com/CarehubStandalone...

beloch2• 5 years ago

Such a law would kill structural batteries [1] in their infancy. That may or may not be a good thing.

--------

[1]https://scitechdaily.com/big-breakthrough-for-massless-energ...

themitigating2• 5 years ago

Couldn't they just cut it out like extracting part of a car frame? The goal is to get inside for the packs

morsch• 5 years ago

Ideal is detergent powder in recycled paper packaging. Or would be, I don't think you can buy it that way.

dEnigma• 5 years ago

You can definitely buy powder in paper/cardboard packaging, at least here in Austria. But I just checked my box, and it's unfortunately not made from recycled fibers. At least recycling this won't be a problem.

BrandoElFollito• 5 years ago

A French company (https://900.care) does that.

No affiliation, but I want to try them out after they popped up in my youtube ads following searches on exactly these kind of products. I do not know if they are good but zt least they tick the sustainability part I was looking for.

ydant• 5 years ago

When I was growing up, (all?) laundry detergent /was/ powder in a cardboard box. I recently remembered that as we tried to move to powdered detergent again - and found it really difficult to find locally, and at a reasonable price per load. There are some online retailers (like "Meliora") which offer it (but then you're adding the small-scale shipping into the environmental equation), so we've just been buying it in bulk that way. And it works perfectly well. They ship their refills in a small brown paper bag - not sure if it's recycled, but the overall impact has to be minimal compared to plastic tubs.

Same with dishwasher detergent. It /used/ to be powder. There's still powder now easy to find, at least, and it works perfectly fine.

jcampbell1• 5 years ago

Those pods are the dumbest invention that consumers have fallen for. Pouring powder from the box works much better for cleaning because you want some washing soda in the pre-wash as well as the main wash. Pour some in the compartment that closes and some on the door, or the little compartment that automatically leaks onto the door. Dishwashing pods are a total scam and they clean dishes less well than pouring powder for 8x the cost and a worse environmental impact.

_ph_2• 5 years ago

At least for the purpose of recycling, where it is ok to destroy any part of the housing, batteries are very recycling friendly, as they are made of modular cells.

andrawesbahou6• 5 years ago

It's going to be hard to push regulation to specifically make it easier to dissassemble them. However, regulation that makes the manufacturer responsible throughout the life of the battery (and beyond the vehicle's warranty period) should be possible, and would force the manufacturer into designing-for-recycling. Disclaimer: I'm affiliated, as a founder, with a company building robots to disassemble car batteries semi-automatically.

jaclaz6• 5 years ago

Even if this (hopefully) happens, and it happens fast, it might become similar (in EU) to what is now the Law regarding solar panels, see:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13250584

idrisser• 5 years ago

These articles are insane, 10min in until you get to the part of what happens to used batteries. I’m really thinking the media business model is totally broken for these authors to not go straight to the point

beloch2• 5 years ago

It's long form (although somewhat short for that). Consider yourself lucky that this article even has a descriptive title and gets around to addressing it at some point in the body. A lot of long form journalism is just a click-bait title with rambling.

Personally, I think long-form writers need to start including abstracts. If I'm going to spend half an hour reading something, I'd like to know what it's about before I commit the time. If no abstract seems adequate to capture the breadth of a long form article's ramblings, then it lacks focus and should be revised.

fho• 5 years ago

Haven't read the article ... But I am always taken aback by these "and now we look at the complete life of the guy that did whatever the article is actually about"-detours.

When I read an article about about ... fishing in Alaska ... I was btw born in the last millenia and had a pretty normal childhood. But if you dig out school colleagues of mine you will find somebody who will tell you I was a strange kid in school .

5 minutes later I have still not read anything about fishing in Alaska.

Feels like complete filler material to me, probably to increase "engagement".

drclau• 5 years ago

I do wonder sometimes if at least some articles are so long just to be able to fit more ad banners within a single article.

I turned off the content blocker and counted 6 ads within the length of this article.

catlikesshrimp4• 5 years ago

It is more opinion than investigative journalism.

This is the only information about what actually happens to batteries. It is very imprecise. And limited to one company

"When batteries can’t be fixed or reused, the company recycles some at its onsite facility. It also stores batteries. Lots of them. SNT’s main warehouse in Oklahoma City holds hundreds of electric car batteries, stacked on shelves that jut 30 feet into the air. With the Bolt recall, GM will send SNT many more."

akolbe• 5 years ago

Kind of surprised there is barely a mention of second-life use of old EV batteries, e.g. for energy storage applications. Which is something GM (along with others) has said it is pursuing. See https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/car-makers-and-...

wombatmobile• 5 years ago

In SNT’s warehouse, bright red emergency water lines snake across the ceilings, a safeguard against calamity.

Are water lines going to be adequate to contain a warehouse full of lithium batteries on fire?

worik• 5 years ago

I like it.

Drinking coffee, by the window, in the shade watching the sun in the garden... Take your time!

stubish• 5 years ago

Does recycled mean scrapping, or refurbishing for less strenuous use such as household or industrial power storage. I would think the lifespan of a car battery should be 20 years, with only 10 actually in a car.

andrawesbahou6• 5 years ago

Recycling in the case of a battery means shredding it, and reducing it into a so-called "black mass", a powder rich in cobalt and nickel. What I've seen is a lot of premature recycling, where batteries with about 70-80% of their state of health remaining get recycled, instead of reused. A promising way around this, is to re-use them in grid storage applications eg. coupled to a wind/solar farm. There, the cycling of battery charge is much less demanding than in a car. (shamelessly, we're starting a company to tackle just that issue, if anyone interested, message me)

catlikesshrimp4• 5 years ago

The question in the article title remains unanswered. The long article develops the question, only.

As I see it, the batteries will end in landfills, best case. If you can pay for it, they will end in landfills abroad. Nobody who is relevant is serious about this problem because those batteries are still working.

Consumers are sold the idea that the situation will improve in the future. Hopefully, I have to add.

So much for climate change.

jillesvangurp• 5 years ago

There are plenty of companies working on this. Hundreds of millions of VC money invested already.

And the situation is already pretty good considering there are no piles of lithium batteries being dumped left right and center. Just not a thing because they are way too valuable for that.

You say landfill, I say lithium mine with extremely rich deposits of lithium. Much richer than most natural deposits of the stuff. People are investing in companies that are extracting it from brines that have no more than a few hundred parts per million. It's that valuable. A battery that has kilos of the stuff is worth the kilo price (about 25-29$) minus the price of extraction. A typical Tesla would have around 60-70 kilos of the stuff; close to 2000$ if you can extract it. The lithium in a completely spent EV battery is worth more than many second hand ICE cars that are still driving around. And that's just accounting for the lithium. There is also copper, nickel, cobalt (at least for now) and a few other nice things in there that are each pretty lucrative to attempt to recycle.

Good old lead acid batteries are recycled as well for the same reason. They are still worth a few dollars because of the raw materials. ICE cars are routinely stripped for anything remotely valuable that can be reused or recycled before the rest of it is melted down so the metal can be recycled.

Anyway, consumers don't need to be sold on anything. They've been fine burning obscene amounts of petrol coming from places they couldn't care less about, mined under nature destroying circumstances they never cared about either. All while not caring about the lethal effects of the pollution they are causing in the environment where they and their loved ones actually live and while not feeling the slightest amount of guilt buying SUV type ICE vehicles guzzling many times the amount of fuel they would actually need to do their shopping and school runs. There is more than a bit of double standards being applied here. Hypocrisy would be a better word for it.

cogman105• 5 years ago

At a minimum, batteries contain large amount of steel, nickel, and cobalt which can all be extracted through simple smelting (Boil the metals).

Why would you throw that away? Those are valuable and expensive resources.

The question is entirely around if you can go further and recycle more of the inners and if you can do this without smelting down the whole battery.

I'm completely convinced these batteries won't end up in landfills. I'm less convinced that we won't get there without burning a bunch of silicon and lithium.

andrawesbahou6• 5 years ago

It's unlikely they will end up in a landfill. A completely spent battery has cobalt, nickel, manganese, lithium, copper and steel which can fetch around $1500 on average. The trick is in how cheaply you can extract those. (The main cost drivers are battery logistics cost, and battery disassembly costs). Fun fact: Spent batteries are categorized as "Hazardous Waste", and need to be transported in explosion-proof containers, with special licenses, and the police needs to be informed of the exact routes that are travelled.

Bias Disclaimer: I'm working at a company (founder) where we build robots to automatically disassemble the batteries and avoid logistics costs.

ecpottinger3• 5 years ago

That is even if the battery is really spent. A 100 kWh battery that is now on 80% will still store 80 kWh of power, lots of power for a solar system, emergency power backup or other non-vehicle uses.

fulafel• 5 years ago

So much for climate change.

Making more cars was never going to solve climate change, EVs still have lifetime co2 footprints of the same magnitude as gas cars plus their use is not capped by available supply of oil.

jaclaz6• 5 years ago

I see this as very relevant:

In Oklahoma City, the batteries in the SNT warehouse mostly came from cars that are still under warranty, which means the automakers are responsible for them. Tyler Helps, the company’s head of business development, says automakers are paying SNT to keep their old batteries because they don’t know what the used battery market is going to look like and whether the materials inside the battery might be more valuable in the future. “So instead of the automakers saying, ‘I'm going to go and dispose of those materials,’ they say, ‘I’m just going to hold onto it,’” he says.

I am not convinced of the analysis, it is more likely that the car makers know that the cost of disposing properly (and in large volumes) such batteries today would be astronomical (let's say - only for the sake of reasoning - US$ 2,000 per car) and prefer to pay (say) US$ 50/year to SNT and postpone the problem by - still say - 10 or 20 years (and most probably they already charged you, inside the price of your new electric vehicle, some US$ 3,000, to stay on the safe side)

In a nutshell, you don't want right now to actually own an electric car past its warranty, you'd be better served by long renting or similar, as there is a concrete risk that if/when your batteries die, there won't be (yet) an effective way to get rid of them cleanly and you may have to pay a non-trivial amount of money for disposing of the battery.

Additionally, it seems to me like this opens a (large) can of worms when it comes to used vehicles.

Will there be specialized technicians/organizations that will give you some form of warranty on the batteries?

cogman105• 5 years ago

The question is how much material can be reclaimed from the battery.

Batteries are resource gold mines with most material readily available (the casing, for example, would be the easiest thing to recycle).

Further, simple recycling (burn everything) of the inner parts is almost certainly worth it just to reclaim the current contents of nickel and cobalt.

What's not clear is if other resources can be reclaimed or if this can be taken further. Can we also reclaim the electrolyte (The substance between the anode and cathode)? Can we do all this without smelting down parts?

That's the unknown. That's also what manufactures are saying when they say "we don't know if this will be more or less valuable in the future." Because, as you can imagine, if recycling is simply applying a chemical wash to the electrolyte and reusing everything else, then you've saved $1000s of dollars avoiding making a new battery.

If, on the other hand, that's not possible, then smelting will still happen as that reclaims expensive materials (primarily nickel and cobalt) at a fraction of the cost of mining them fresh.

In other words, we know how to recycle battery materials. We don't know if we can recycle all of the battery materials. As a result, battery manufactures are just waiting until the cost of manufacturing new batteries becomes cost prohibitive without starting a recycling plant.

jaclaz6• 5 years ago

The question is how much material can be reclaimed from the battery.

My question was rather different, much more simple/practical.

Today (not tomorrow, not ten years from now) I own a "normal" ICE car and for some reasons it breaks beyond any possible repair.

Currently (and it may depend on countries) I can sell the wreck to someone authorized to dismantle it and get a few hundred bucks for it or - in the worst case - pay someone to dismantle/recycle it a few hundred bucks (and I can - within limits - choose among many companies that provide this services according to the current Law).

What would happen (still today) if the car was an electric one?

andrawesbahou6• 5 years ago

The $2000USD figure is approximately correct. We've run the numbers to be between $800-3200 depending on the weight of the battery, and how difficult it is to disassemble. 3200 for a 700kg Porsche Tycan battery.

(My cofounder and I launched a company to disassemble the batteries robotically, if you're interested in helping us build it, please message me).

yodon• 5 years ago

As an FYI there's no way to directly message capability here on HN so if you're interested in people being able to reach you you might want to put some form of contact info in your profile.

syshum• 5 years ago

This has all the hallmarks of liability shift as well. Akin to the "superfund" sites. While I dont think this will be that extreme I can see more than a few of these companies that just house this kind of thing quietly going bankrupt leaving the local (or federal) tax payers holding the bill to do the proper disposal

bittercynic• 5 years ago

In a nutshell, you don't want right now to actually own an electric car past its warranty, you'd be better served by long renting or similar

If you can tolerate the risk, a used, out-of-warranty ev can be pretty economical. You'd want to do something to evaluate the condition of the battery, and then accept that there is some probability of a battery failure that will not be worth fixing.

lnsru• 5 years ago

It will happen the same what is happening with used tires in some countries. Stockpile tires, gather millions of them and let them burn. There is no way to extinguish such fire. So now batteries are stacked in piles, hundreds gathered together in one place. Another fire that can’t be extinguished. Battery problem is solved! I really don’t believe about rising value of used batteries in the future. The future recycling process will be designed for future more recycle able batteries and not current toxic waste.

ZeroGravitas• 5 years ago

Are EVs worse for the environment than ICE cars?

Let me check with some experts, okay, no they're not.

But what if they burn coal in the electric plant?

Well, we shouldn't do that but still, mildly surprisingly until you think about it, no, still better.

But what about when we run out of rare earths?

They're not rare, so that's not a problem.

I didn't mean run out, I know they're not rare, I meant what about the pollution and the foreigners owning them all?

Did I mention they weren't rare? They don't own them all, they just make them at the moment because we moved a lot of extraction and manufacturing there to take advantage of their low wages and lax labor and environmental laws.

Hah, so you admit that EVs are worse than ICE vehicles!

No, see my first answer.

But if mining stuff is bad and you need to mine stuff for EVs then EVs are bad, and we shouldn't shift to them. QED

Is that seriously your argument?

Okay, never mind that, but what about this warehouse that has hundreds (yeah, not simply dozens but hundreds, with an h!) of batteries in it. Isn't that conclusive proof that climate change was just a hoax by communists to take over the world?

No?

Hah, no-one really believed that, we just really hate regulations so pretended to believe that.

You seem very concerned about pollution and recycling for someone who doesn't like regulation.

No, it's okay we're lying about that too.

DeathArrow• 5 years ago

Does anyone know what happens to used batteries? After 2 minutes of reading I gave up.

tzs• 5 years ago

For old EV batteries where the only reason they need replacement is reduced capacity I wonder if they might be useful in some stationary applications? I'd love to have a whole-house battery backup system for the occasional power outage, but systems with new batteries are too expensive.

An 80 kWh battery, say, that has lost half its capacity would have been enough to get me through most outages I've seen since moving into my current house 15 years ago without me having to even try to reduce power during the outage. The one or two outages where that would not have been enough, it would have been sufficient to just dress warmer, turn the thermostat down a little, and avoid doing laundry.

I'd be interested in this as long as the price per kWh of the degraded battery is significantly lower than the price for a new battery with the same capacity. The degraded battery is going to be good for much less cycles than a new battery of the same capacity, so it should cost less.

jasoncartwright• 5 years ago

BMW have deals to do reuse old batteries for static storage. https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/united-kingdom/article/detail...

goinfar• 5 years ago

There is a booming market for people that use them in camper vans/overland style vehicle applications alongside solar panels.

the-dude• 5 years ago

Would you have any links to projects?

drewg123• 5 years ago

I'm not very knowledgeable about this, but don't think they fail this gracefully.

I thought that a lot of the battery failures in EVs was due to the failures of individual cells (like AA batteries) within modules, which make it impossible for the BMS to balance power between modules. There was a recent youtube video where an old Model S had its range dramatically reduced to less than 25% because a module had 2 bad cells. The cells were replaced, and the car works as normal now. There was a debate about how long-term that fix would be (eg, would the same thing happen soon, as other cells die).

sokoloff• 5 years ago

My LEAF had that repair done under warranty (cell #17 was dramatically weaker than the rest, resulting in the pack suddenly having around 33% range and 50% power). Repair was disassemble, change module #9 (cells 17&18), reassemble but took about 2 calendar weeks for parts and trained labor reasons (repair itself was done in a single day).

3.25 years later there is no evidence of recurrence/spread and battery diagnostics are all good. That’s an N of 1, but I don’t see any structural reason to think my battery would now be any different than the sibling car’s battery that was next off the production line (assuming there was no additional fault introduced during service).

What happens to used electric car batteries?

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