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by gibolt 1014 days ago
Exactly. Batteries are being recycled at scale today with 98-95% material recovery rates, depending on the company.

We are still early in the development cycle of recycling technology, which means we'll be closer to 99.x% in a decade when the first large wave of EV batteries (from the last decade) could start getting close to End of Life.
1 comments
seanmcdirmid 1014 days ago
Batteries can be recycled at high rates of recovery, but most non-EV lithium batteries aren’t being recycled (basically because they aren’t sent to battery recycling centers given their small sizes). The anti-EV crowd then uses that statistic to deride EVS.
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r00fus 1014 days ago
But the value of nickel in say a NiMH battery makes it feasible to reclaim/“recycle”
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seanmcdirmid 1014 days ago
Most small batteries are sent to landfills, whether they have lithium or nickel. EV batteries and nickel car batteries are easier to recycle because there is an auto shop involved to collect and send the battery to a recycler. If you replace your NiMH 12V battery yourself (rather than having it done in the shop), you might be tempted to just throw it away in your garbage can also (even though you shouldn’t) simply because you have no idea how to get it to a recycler. You are unlikely to change the big battery in your Tesla on your own, so that isn’t a problem.

Battery recycling is really just a logistics problem.

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barkingcat 1014 days ago
In Canada at least, when you buy a car / ev battery depending on the chemistry you get a coupon that you redeem for a significant amount of money when you take your old replaced battery back to the place you bought the new battery. The vendor will take back any brand/regardless of where you got the old battery from.

There are people who "throw away" the coupon by not returning the old battery, but hey that's on them.

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seanmcdirmid 1014 days ago
It is incredibly profitable to recycle an EV battery, so I’m not sure why the coupon is needed. The owner should get cash or a discount on their new battery.
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JumpCrisscross 1014 days ago
> Battery recycling is really just a logistics problem

It’s also one of scale. We don’t yet have enough EV batteries being retired to merit the recycling infrastructure. China is just reaching the point where it does.

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seanmcdirmid 1014 days ago
Most EV batteries that age out of car use can be repurposed for home/solar, so this is true. But they will eventually need to be recycled.
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