Japan develops a method to recover up to 90% of lithium from used EV batteries

https://tech.supercarblondie.com/japan-recovers-up-to-90-of-lithium-from-used-ev-batteries/

by donohoe • 9 days ago

750 192 9 days ago

tech.supercarblondie.com

fzeroff• 9 days ago

What a poorly written article

donjapan22• 9 days ago

While I’m very excited for the new recycling breakthrough, I felt the same. It was… off

Danox7• 9 days ago

How is Toyota and Honda doing in the car market in comparison to GM and Ford? How is Sony and Nintendo doing in the gaming market? In comparison to Microsoft? How is Japan doing in the steel industry? How is Japan doing in their efforts to match Space X? I Applaud their recent success with their rocket.

Japan seems to do well in research and development, and they also seem to open to iterate over time very well when they put their minds to it. I’m glad they’re somewhat on our side but not mindlessly so.

realxrobau• 9 days ago

Did you expect more from a website called Supercar Blondie?

yanhangyhy2• 9 days ago

why bother? japan hate EV

jazzyjackson2• 9 days ago

Japan wants domestic industry and specializes in things other than battery production

nextaccountic• 9 days ago

On another comment in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48902162 it is said

Toyota is still digging its heels in on gas-powered cars, even though the fact that Tesla used Japanese batteries in its early days proves Japan was once ahead of the curve.but they always seem to retreat right back into their comfort zone after a brief flash of brilliance, watching the rest of the world race ahead while they continue living in the past.

Did Japan get behind on battery tech? Couldn't them make a priority to get an edge there too?

mc33015• 9 days ago

I used to follow it closely and be in the industry, but it still seems like Japan is gonna be the last "mostly ICE cars" of the developed countries.

Which is a shame, because it has a perfect combination of short-range needs (I mean, look at kei-cars), tons of wonderful places to hang out while charging (toll-way rest areas are so good), rare sub-freezing temperatures in most of the country, mandatory vehicle inspections (which could collect great safety data as well as preventative maintenance), general love of new cars and brand loyalty, lack of political or individual divide of "big gas trucks are manly", mobile-power-station earthquake preparedness (a nice bonus), generally cooperative nation-wide infrastructure...

I guess we just have to hope the main automakers can hold on long enough for solid-state batteries and move faster than a snail's pace when it does.

cammikebrown• 9 days ago

If you live in Tokyo or Osaka you really shouldn’t own a car

inatreecrown2• 9 days ago

Isn't the reason they are so slow to adapt them that they have not enough electricity?

tyre• 9 days ago

In your opinion/experience, why is it that they aren't switching?

cyberax2• 9 days ago

Solid-state batteries are facing production hell now, with lots of issues cropping up when tested at large-scale in real devices.

So they are not expected in meaningful quantities until the early 2030-s.

And the LFP chemistry has now advanced so much that solid-state batteries might not even matter anymore, except for some niche uses like aviation/drones.

xbmcuser• 9 days ago

Why cars though I think people are still stuck with the cars mindset. But with electric we can get smaller ebikes/pods for individuals instead of cars

freetime24• 9 days ago

EV sales have doubled in Japan in the first half of 2026. [1] This has been spurred by some pretty large subsidies:

In January this year, the government raised the maximum subsidy for EVs by ¥400,000 to ¥1.3 million. While the maximum subsidy for minicar EVs remained unchanged at ¥580,000, many domestic models are receiving the full subsidy amount.
One EV model benefiting from this subsidy system is Honda Motor Co.’s compact Super-ONE, launched in late May. Originally priced at about ¥3.39 million, including tax, it can be purchased for ¥2.09 million — on par with minicar EVs — when the subsidy is applied. Demand has been overwhelming, with some dealerships temporarily suspending acceptance of orders.
The Tokyo metropolitan government raised its subsidy cap in July in response to rising crude oil prices caused by the deteriorating situation in the Middle East. Models from Toyota, Honda and Nissan, in principle, can receive subsidies of ¥900,000 or more per vehicle.

If they keep up with these subsidies, I think we could see some pretty rapid adoption of EVs. Charging infrastructure still needs to improve, though.

PHEVs are also eligible for subsidies, with the price of PHEVs being comparable to the cost of a HEV after subsidies. I think this can also help to get people used to the idea of driving EVs and charging at home.

[1] https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/business/companies/20260707-...

chvid• 9 days ago

It is curious - you would think they would love it? But they don't - is it simply the case of the Chinese beating them - stubbornness and pride? Or is there something more going on?

Toyota was seemingly decades ahead at one point with their hybrid cars; but now they have resigned to a defensive position compared to Tesla, Chinese automakers, even the European ones.

yanhangyhy2• 9 days ago

you would think they would love it?

no. i just found it funny.

Or is there something more going on?

I remember BYD actually had to design models specifically tailored to the Japanese market (k-car)—their preferences are honestly so bizarre. I think a lot of this comes down to their national character. Once external momentum fades—like the industrial transfers from the US—they seem to lose the drive for technological innovation. They just cling to whatever they already have and refuse to adapt to global shifts.People in Japan are still using Yahoo and fax machines（not to mention their own bizarrely proprietary text editors,Hidemaru/SAKURA editor, to compare, in china, it's also vscode）.

Toyota is still digging its heels in on gas-powered cars, even though the fact that Tesla used Japanese batteries in its early days proves Japan was once ahead of the curve.but they always seem to retreat right back into their comfort zone after a brief flash of brilliance, watching the rest of the world race ahead while they continue living in the past.

BLKNSLVR• 9 days ago

Toyota's first Prius (hybrid) came out in 1997 and Nissan's first Leaf (full electric) in 2010. Both Japanese, both ahead of the curve, now way behind it.

It is an interesting situation.

Anecdote: I have a 2014 Leaf, purchased a couple of years ago as the first foray into EVs. It's a great little car, perfect for the daily short trips for which we bought it. Use-case matters!

jeffbee2• 9 days ago

Every Tesla made in America contains 500 kilos of Japan's finest batteries. Honda may hate the EV but Panasonic does not.

rootusrootus• 9 days ago

Japan's finest batteries

Aren’t all Teslas made in the US supplied with American made batteries? In partnership with Panasonic, for the Model 3, but still a Tesla factory in Nevada. And I think 4680s are all Tesla made, correct?

zaik• 9 days ago

Can this be replaced with the original NHK World article?

iwassayinbourns• 9 days ago

I can’t seem to find it on NHK World at all apart from in a video from April? Is this old news? The linked article is also very sensationalized.

Edit: linked article is also from April.

bamboozled• 9 days ago

“Japan”, as in the whole country developed this tech ?

jazzyjackson2• 9 days ago

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

acksmack• 9 days ago

TIL 'The White House' isn't a sentient building

waterproof• 9 days ago

according to https://x.com/Mith_/status/2041911606213537971

The industry standard for the recovery of lithium (remember there is a difference between recovery and extraction) is 90%, with some platforms now achieving 95%+ like those that use carbonation.

toomuchtodo2• 9 days ago

Some battery recycling challenges are minimal volume at this point on the EV adoption curve, and LFP and sodium ion battery chemistries won’t be worth recycling for the materials alone (but still require recycling as ewaste).

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/13/nx-s1-5847025/ev-battery-recy...

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/02/nx-s1-5706658/electric-vehicl...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48893945

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48013768

koolala2• 9 days ago

What is the standard non-renewable resource used for the recovery process? What materials are used up as catalysts to convert it back?

nicman23• 9 days ago

more importantly what is the cost versus getting it the non recyclable way

Sabinus• 9 days ago

Sulfuric acid, hydrogen peroxide, sodium carbonate. Not catalysts but reagents. Most currently come from fossil fuel feedstock but that isn't essential.

jorisw• 9 days ago

https://xcancel.com/Mith_/status/2041911606213537971

cyphar• 9 days ago

It really should not be surprising that we can get very high recovery percentages from batteries -- we do not mine elemental lithium, so the processes we use for extraction are already designed to extract lithium from fairly low-purity sources. In contrast, lithium batteries are an incredibly high-purity source of lithium. The main question is when it will become cost-effective to create recycling pipelines.

Lead acid batteries had a similar trajectory and modern lead acid batteries are effectively 100% recycled.

JumpCrisscross3• 9 days ago

It really should not be surprising that we can get very high recovery percentages from batteries -- we do not mine elemental lithium

Plenty of substances we don't mine elementally are not worth recycling. The main advantage with lithium is it tends to go into large volumes of standardised chemistries.

leonidasrup3• 9 days ago

U.S. lead acid baterries recycling has been outsourced.

" As the United States tightened regulations on lead processing to protect Americans over the past three decades, finding domestic lead became a challenge. So the auto industry looked overseas to supplement its supply. In doing so, car and battery manufacturers pushed the health consequences of lead recycling onto countries where enforcement is lax, testing is rare and workers are desperate for jobs. "

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/20/world/americas/car-batter...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/18/world/africa/...

t_mahmood• 9 days ago

Yeah, too many lead batteries here, and there are a lot of battery recycle factories. It's been a health and environment concern for a while. And these batteries allowed to put motors on rickshaw, we call them "Tesla", And they are also another hazard, and menace for the price of faster transportation.

dv_dt2• 9 days ago

Don't get on such a high horse about US regulatory effectiveness.

This is recently (2010) in California even: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exide_lead_contamination

Still, the overall benefit might be seen as positive for lithium from shifting widespread air pollution from combustion engines to more localized pollution. Though obviously the world needs to work on better processes for the local pollutants.

qsera8• 9 days ago

countries where enforcement is lax

As an Indian this is exactly one of the reasons why I am afraid of EV boom. All of that bad stuff, which we are mostly unfamiliar with (in terms of how to handle it properly, because battery tech is always changing) is going to dumped in places like India. And would silently sustain the bad effects for many decades or even more, until it (the bad stuff) somehow reaches some developed country (probably never).

protocolture3• 9 days ago

Lead acid batteries had a similar trajectory and modern lead acid batteries are effectively 100% recycled.

Getting rid of all that waste material from Galena was maybe a different incentive structure but yeah.

vasco2• 9 days ago

If you've ever seen a video of Nigerians "recycling" lead batteries you'd be hard pressed to call it that. Katana in one hand, bucket on the floor, no shoes, let's go.

JuniperMesos• 9 days ago

I confess I am not sure what role the katana plays in Nigerian lead battery recycling.

legitster2• 9 days ago

This is probably somewhat true, but also I suspect there might be an order of magnitude difference from extracting trace lithium from inert rock vs collecting it as a salt from amongst a medley of very refined metals.

Case in point - lead acid batteries are not a fair comparison. A lead acid battery is so robust you can separate the cathodes and anodes with your (gloved) hands. Getting the elements out of a lead battery is like picking pieces of pepperoni off of a pizza. Whereas taking lithium out of a lithium cell is like pulling only a certain protein out of a roll of bologna. And the protein catches fire in contact with air.

Alpha3031• 9 days ago

And the protein catches fire in contact with air.

FWIW neither lithium metal nor most Li-ion electrode chemistries autoignite in air at STP. The fire hazard is primarily due to heating up to the ignition temperature through short circuits though there are also exothermic reactions with e.g. water that can heat things up sufficiently.

Being the eager electron donor it is, once it is on fire it is very hard to put out, of course.

lstodd• 9 days ago

What is more fun is that it reacts with water (and all air has some moisture) which then leaves hydrogen to catch fire and explode.

One can replace air with pure nitrogen for example, but that complicates things.

ErroneousBosh2• 9 days ago

As late as the early 80s and probably later there was a guy in the city I live near that had a battery recycling company where they did just that - melted the pitch to extract the cells from the battery "bucket", cut the old cells off and melted them down, cast new grids and put new lead oxide in, and sealed it all up again.

My dad bought a recycled lorry battery off them in the late 70s, and I remember going to the place to pick it up. I can't imagine it was a very safe place to work, and I expect that was pretty much a maximum lifetime exposure to lead in one hit ;-)

jandrewrogers• 8 days ago

Under normal conditions lithium metal doesn't spontaneously ignite. It is the least spicy of the Group 1 metals (ignoring the special case of hydrogen).

tpm3• 9 days ago

I think the issues with recycling lithium from electrolyte containing lithium hexafluorophosphate in solvents is more the hexafluorophosphate part; it's highly reactive, hygroscopic and releases (toxic, corrosive) hydrogen fluoride upon contact with water. So purely from economic perspective it's possibly not worth it unless we are very lithium-constrained. Of course it should be done anyway as there will be a lot of used batteries in near future.

The article doesn't really give us the details which is a pity.

ufocia5• 9 days ago

Of course it should be done anyway as there will be a lot of used batteries in near future.

The necessity for recycling those batteries, without more, does not logically follow from their relative abundance in view of the purely economic perspective you posit. Why not just bury them?

It may be the scarcity of lithium that may drive us to take otherwise expensive steps to recycle such batteries.

The conclusory "of course" sets the argument up for a failure from the outset. Though it is not the only flaw.

Danox7• 9 days ago

Since Japan is an island country and they have relatively limited lithium rare earth resources, probably, it makes sense for them to look into recycling, and the same would apply to many other countries that don’t have a huge landmass like Canada, United States, China, Australia, and Russia.

It makes sense to try an recycle rare earths or many other types of metals that you may be short of, and I would say for a country like Japan, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, it would make sense to make the effort.

I would think price would be no object if you want to maintain some independence, it’s probably why Switzerland and Denmark are teaming up on Thorium research currently.

simondotau3• 9 days ago

This article is poor, because lithium is just one part of the value contained within EV batteries. Far more valuable is any nickel, cobalt and graphite. Equally valuable is any copper and aluminium. Unless you're effectively recycling a significant number of the major materials, it's not enough.

Furthermore, it's not a remarkable achievement. By contrast to this headline, Redwood Materials claims "Redwood’s technology can recover, on average, more than 95% of materials like nickel, cobalt, copper, aluminum, lithium and graphite in a lithium-ion battery."[0]

[0] https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/recycle-with-us/

mbgerring2• 9 days ago

The battery supply chain is moving away from NMC because of the myriad problems with nickel and cobalt and has been for a long time.

simondotau3• 9 days ago

Yes, LFP is a better chemistry for various reasons including cost. Thankfully this means that nickel and cobalt are not needed for EVs adoption to continue scaling.

For now, NMC remains superior for some high performance applications, as well as for high-end laptops and phones. Yes, there are "myriad" problems with nickel and cobalt. These problems will diminish as scale makes recycling economically competitive to virgin material mining.

At some point the number of EV batteries being disposed will approach equilibrium to the number of new vehicle batteries manufactured. When this happens the amount of virgin nickel and cobalt needed will also approach zero.

tpm3• 9 days ago

Far more valuable is any nickel, cobalt and graphite. Equally valuable is any copper and aluminium.

All of these metals are already almost fully recycled (not sure about graphite). Lithium is the toughest to recycle and it's not solved yet, so it's right to focus on that, because there will be a lot of lithium electrolyte to dispose in the near future.

Danox7• 9 days ago

It is in Japan’s interest to use the resources at hand around them, in short, do the research whenever possible to consider all options…

jmcgough• 9 days ago

This new technique doesn’t just recycle materials; it recovers most of them at an unbelievable rate.

I'm so tired of reading articles written by LLM. There are several sites that just ingest material (like studies) and crap out low-effort LLM articles.

dodos• 9 days ago

I used to enjoy watching smaller youtubers, but everytime I've given one a chance lately it has been unbearably clear that it was written by an llm. Supposedly people have ingested so much llm writing that they've naturally started writing in a similar style.

ggm• 9 days ago

The key point will be the energy inputs, and catalyst or other process input losses. Not the % recovery, its more recovery at an economically viable cost

Many processes could recover the inputs. Some are tremendously polluting. Cheap methods to recover lead from older lead-acid car batteries would be an example, or the way scavengers burn plastic insulation of recovered copper wiring.

TL;DR exernalities and economics and pollution drive recycling issues, not % recovery at this point. We know how to recover a lot of the inputs. Knowing how to industrialise and scale it up is what counts.

John McCarthy (of LISP fame) was an (in)famous curmudgeon on USENET, frequently used to say future generations will thank us for making giant collections in the ground of highly valuable recoverable industrial inputs, what we call "rubbish dumps" -He was only partially less wrong, but had a point to make about the cost of inputs to industry vs raw mining costs. If we do come up with a process to strip mine rubbish dumps and send feedstocks in the appropriate directions there's a lot there. Complex plastics, Metals, Organics, Acids, Methane Gas, you-name-it. We already collect and harvest the methane to drive other dump works, the idea of mining the materials isn't "wrong" as much as insufficiently economic right now against raw material sources.

justnoice• 9 days ago

The 90% recovery rate is not groundbreaking by itself. The real value is lower contamination and emissions—but it still needs to prove cost-effective at industrial scale.

nkmnz2• 9 days ago

Scientists found a way to extract up to 90% of oxygen from air! They call it “breathing”.

JumpCrisscross3• 9 days ago

Scientists found a way to extract up to 90% of oxygen from air! They call it “breathing”

No, they don't and no, they wouldn't. "Inhaled air [at sea level] contains 21% O2 while exhaled breath contains approximately 16% O2 and 5% CO2" [1]. 24% recovery.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8672270/

nkmnz2• 9 days ago

Genius.

stevefan1999• 9 days ago

So long or short Lithium?

feverzsj2• 9 days ago

What about the cost? In China, most used batteries are just burned and buried, so the recycling cost is very low.

est2• 9 days ago

whataboutism and fake news

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61481-y

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/china-recovery-mat...

feverzsj2• 9 days ago

According to the latest report from a state owned media, 75% of used batteries end up in underground workshops.

[0] https://www.yicai.com/news/103030411.html

googletop• 9 days ago

Mercedes opened a battery recycling plant in 2024, claiming a recycling rate of 96%, of the whole battery. So not sure how much of a breakthrough this japanese tech is https://group.mercedes-benz.com/company/news/recycling-facto...

chihuahua• 9 days ago

Probably an instance of the "Thing :-| Thing in Japan 8-)" meme.

roarkeful• 8 days ago

To be fair, the Japanese factory is probably cuter.

jillesvangurp• 9 days ago

The article seems to be very unspecific about what it is this company does that is so different. It also steps over the fact that there are already quite a few companies active in the US, EU, and China that are recycling batteries. Nor is the cited percentage that remarkable. That's ballpark what competitors are achieving as well. Probably a bit more. 10% lithium is a lot of lithium to not recover. Most natural deposits of lithium have very low concentrations of it.

The main thing actually holding back the recycling industry is the lack of batteries that need recycling, not the lack of technology needed to recycle them. Most of the batteries produced in the last ten years are still being used. And quite a few might head for a second life in storage for another decade or so. It's probably going to be another decade before recycling hits a scale where it becomes a significant and lucrative source of valuable raw materials.

And as others mentioned, it's not just about recycling the lithium in batteries. It's not like cobalt, nickel, copper, graphite, etc. end up on the trash heap.

officeplant2• 8 days ago

lack of batteries that need recycling

This is why I would like to see regulation on disposable lithium powered devices. Some other countries are enforcing it finally with all the disposable vapes littering our environments. Easiest method is similar handling to lead acid batteries requiring you to return a battery to buy one, or pay a core charge. It could even encourage people to pick up vapes off the ground so they can go buy one without the charge.

akssri2• 9 days ago

Some geopolitical context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Senkaku_boat_collision_in...

https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/comme...

Japan was one of the first countries to be hit with rare-earth export-restrictions by China - going back to 2010. It seems that a lot of policy came out from this unpleasant shock, incl. the decision by Toyota to focus on developing FCEVs which would be less dependent on Chinese supply-chains. Ironically, the resulting vacuum may have actually led to Chinese/American companies gaining market share in the BEV space.

Still, given how things are going, FCEVs (and Japan with it) might actually end-up having the last laugh.

legitster2• 9 days ago

There's a reason Japan could be burdened with the largest modern nuclear disaster and then choose to double down on nuclear capacity. It's an island nation with no domestic energy reserves - completely dependent on energy markets.

FCEVs make no sense if you have plenty of fossil fuel or access to cheap lithium batteries. But if you see hydrogen as a less resource-bottlenecked way to store energy, it starts to make sense.

topato• 9 days ago

I’ve always been amazed at how differently the PHEV, HFC, and standard EV market ended up (well, until recently) playing out, in Japan Vs The Rest of the World. I always found the hydrogen stations here in California to be an interesting anomaly — but once you learn about the infrastructure and vehicles forced on the Japanese by gov/corp alliance, you really get a fascinating ‘alternate reality/history’ localized entirely on the island of Japan lol

Danox7• 9 days ago

Japan, as an island nation, it’s only natural that Japan look for ways that can use the ocean around them, it is also natural for them to look to recycle, and cost is no object, relatively speaking, because you have to try to use the resources at hand around you.

numpad05• 9 days ago

Hydrogen stations basically don't exist in Japan either. There are less than 100 total throughout Japan and whopping ten in Tokyo. California probably have more per capita of those.

dudisubekti• 9 days ago

last laugh

Can I ask your reasoning?

Currently hydrogen is just oil with extra steps. Efficient electrolysis either needs ultra-rare materials like iridium and platinum, or exotic ceramics for continuous high-temperature electrolysis.

I personally can't see how this arrangement can supplant oil and batteries.

tonyedgecombe2• 9 days ago

If anybody else wondered FCEV = Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle.

joe_mamba• 9 days ago

Still, given how things are going, FCEVs (and Japan with it) might actually end-up having the last laugh.

There's really no evidence and trend to back this up as a likely outcome.

numpad05• 9 days ago

I don't understand how "Japan is betting on Hydrogen" meme survived this long. Toyota sold something like up to 20k total of passenger FCEV in past 10-20 years. That's less than a quarter worth in Prius sales numbers. It always has been a joke and a futurism porn.

Is it coming from some internal Slack channel at Tesla or something? Whoever spreading it don't know what they're talking about.

akssri2• 8 days ago

Between METI, Toyota & others, they appear to have spent > $40B over multiple decades.

It's a bit silly to downplay their investment based on the sales numbers of Toyota Mirai.

BaudouinVH• 9 days ago

The article is very, very light with details. The university or research center is not named. No scientist is named. No link. Nothing that tells "look, we're telling you real, solid, serious stuff."

Here is another article with that details : https://www.techspot.com/news/112051-japan-finds-way-recover...

neuroelectron• 9 days ago

Being able to quickly skim articles is definitely a skill that has paid in spades since the advent of AI slop.

cicko• 9 days ago

you seem to have missed the domain on which the article is posted

ufocia5• 9 days ago

Still slop. This article appears to conflate battery recycling with lithium recovery, two distinct steps to achieve high lithium reuse.

mrob• 8 days ago

Doesn't read like slop to me. The only sentence that could be argued to conflate the two is:

A new law taking effect this year will require manufacturers and importers to collect and recycle small portable batteries from the likes of phones, vapes, and power tools.

But "recycle" doesn't necessarily mean closed-loop recycling (recycling into the same products). Lithium recovery is a type of open-loop recycling and the surrounding paragraphs talk about lithium recovery so this is a reasonable interpretation.

andrewclunn• 9 days ago

The "up to" seems to be doing a lot of work.

thegrim33• 8 days ago

Yup. Any time you see weasel words, especially this one, whether it's in advertisements, product descriptions, wherever, you can instantly dismiss the product/claim. It's such a quick and easy tell to notice.

boutell• 9 days ago

Thank you. Among other important points there:

"That said, Japan isn't the only country pursuing lithium recovery. In the US, Redwood Materials – the recycling company founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel – says it's already recovering 95% of lithium from the equivalent of about 250,000 EVs per year."

EV batteries are too large and valuable to wind up in landfills, although I'm sure it has happened somewhere. I do like that Japan is is making it harder to just throw out smaller lithium batteries. That strikes me as a more probable source of waste.

pixl97• 8 days ago

I would add that EV batteries are too flammable to end up in landfills. A few small batteries from things like phones and laptops generally make it through the waste processing chain without rupturing and causing problems, but a large pile of them outside of containment starts becoming a certainty that one will break and set the whole lot on fire.

catigula• 8 days ago

Classic

racism
racism, Japan

Type scenario.

progx• 9 days ago

Costs?

dburkland• 9 days ago

Redwood Materials already recovers 95% so why is this news?

bell-cot• 9 days ago

I could speculate about Redwood's tech being more expensive in other ways, or Japan having "not invented here" issues. But it sounds like 90% vs 95% is academic in today's Japan:

In Japan's case, though, the biggest bottleneck right now isn't the technology. It's actually getting dead batteries to recyclers in the first place. Only about 14% of end-of-life lithium-ion batteries in the country currently make it through official collection channels. Many retired EVs actually end up getting exported, making those valuable metals inaccessible. Solving this problem is now more important than ever.

runtime_lens• 9 days ago

The technical challenge has never been recovering materials. It's recovering them cheaply enough that recycling beats mining. If this process scales economically, it could end up being more important than another small improvement in battery chemistry.

trhway• 9 days ago

lithium is $22/kg, 100KWh battery is 10kg lithium, i.e. the question is can you do it for $200?

eecc• 9 days ago

There are other forces besides market prices... regulatory compliance comes to mind..

imtringued• 9 days ago

Or the fact that China is the primary source of lithium and if Chinese car brands start exporting their cars worldwide, there is no reason for them give the raw resources to western car manufacturers, forcing them to buy the whole battery pack from China.

broccolover• 9 days ago

My guy just called human rights abuses (lithium mining) ‘geopolitically complicated’

hungryhobo• 9 days ago

worth noting this isn't ground breaking or anything, the status quo for lithium recovery from battery recycling in many countries is already > 90%

jwr• 9 days ago

Incidentally, companies developing technologies for reusing EV batteries in grid storage applications (where even <80% capacity EV batteries are just fine for many years), have trouble getting enough EV batteries, because they last much longer than we were made to believe.

qsera8• 9 days ago

"how much they last" does not play a part in the recycle load the industry will have to handle though...

brandelune• 9 days ago

It looks like it’s not so much a breakthrough than an ongoing research that aims at producing this kind of results at scale:

https://green-innovation.nedo.go.jp/en/article/liquid-lithiu...

“While these targets have already been achieved at the laboratory level, we are now moving into the phase of mid-scale demonstration,”

rohin15• 9 days ago

Online hydrometallurgy plants are already more effective than this.

Ratelman• 9 days ago

So this isn't groundbreaking results and the article itself is of questionable quality without sufficient detail as to why this is a newsworthy result. How is this the top rated article on hacker news? A more meaningful example would have been the paper that sets out a scalable and cost-effective route for closing the loop on LFP materials, while demonstrating that high-yield lithium recovery and environmental responsibility are not mutually exclusive: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092134492...

ufocia5• 9 days ago

Agreed. For example, what does the color of lithium hydroxide used instead of sodium hydroxide have to do with anything? They are both white.

gus_massa• 8 days ago

Yep, the part about the color is ridiculous. After reading that paragraph a few times my guess is:

<guess>

The normal procces uses Sodium Hidroxide that destroy a lot of things but the result is a mix of crap, Sodium salts an Litium salts that are very difficult to separate because they have very similar chemical properties.

Usualy Sodium Hidroxide is cheaper, so in general it's a good idea. But they have plenty of Litium arround.

If you replace the Sodium Hidroxide in the procces with Litium Hidroxide, it should destroy almost everything too. But now the result isonly crap an Litium salt, so you can skip a big part of the separation procces.

</guess>

lencastre• 9 days ago

seems as credible as room temperature super conductors

jszymborski• 9 days ago

This new technique doesn’t just recycle materials; it recovers most of them at an unbelievable rate.

This isn't just an LLMism, it's a painfully redundant phrase. Not much worth me reading forward if even the authors weren't arsed to write the damn thing.

minraws• 9 days ago

I would like govts to legislate this and make recycling a necessary part of the product lifecycle, maybe help companies out, the recovery is a lot less energy intensive and harmful for the environment than mining and sourcing them generally, I genuinely question why hasn't it scaled up across the world, it doesn't seem like it's impossible challenge, perhaps until recently sourcing it was cheap enough that no one invested in scaling it up.

I remember how Lead acid battery recycling has now become commonplace even in fairly under developed parts of the world. I guess it's all about incentives. sigh.

nashashmi• 8 days ago

This whole time I thought lithium was recyclable. We have been wasting our time on this! 50 pct recovery is terrible.

officeplant2• 8 days ago

It's going to be a strange day 8-10 years from now (my EV is 2.5 years old) when it comes time to try and get an aftermarket or OEM replacement battery for it, hopefully the larger one from a later model.

If recycling is set up properly the core charge is going to be enormous and make me question if its worth turning in the old battery or repurposing it as home electricity storage.

greenoracle9• 8 days ago

A 90% recovery process does not help much if most batteries never make it into the right recycling stream in the first place.

qiuwu• 7 days ago

OK, huge title with little detail.

Can't believe until i saw a comment 'Less dependence on China', then i got it.

Believe in what you want to believe, not depends on truth.

Japan develops a method to recover up to 90% of lithium from used EV batteries

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