It would be beneficial to say that the legacy of today’s electric cars will be a mountain of lithium-ion battery waste. In 2017, when global sales of electric cars surpassed one million cars a year for the first time, estimates by researchers at the UK-based University of Birmingham revealed astonishing figures. These cars alone intend to leave some 250,000 tons of untreated battery waste when, despite everything, they succeeded in the scrap heap in 2027. This is just the beginning.
Currently, recycling rates for lithium-ion batteries in Europe, the United States and Australia are less than 5%, for an undeniable reason: this is not easy. Each electric vehicle (EV) battery houses a multitude of exotic fabrics that make recycling batteries with lead acid or nickel hydride look like a walk in the park. Although large-scale services exist to recycle the essential elements of the lithium-ion battery, processes charge Earth in terms of cash and energy consumed.
However, not everything is lost. A growing number of study organizations, start-ups and established corporations are implementing new strategies for more elements of the electric car battery. At the same time, energy corporations are partnering with automakers to locate new tactics to reuse the old lithium-ion battery.
A typical example is the battery of the Nissan Leaf electric car, which takes on a new life in a power garage formula developed through Japanese automaker Nissan and US power control company Eaton. Launched in 2016 and designed to save electric power and family money, the xStorage Home formula was Nissan’s reaction to similar Tesla and Mercedes formulas, but with the merit of old or “second life” batteries.
xStorage Home connects 12 above-productive Nissan Leaf lithium-ion batteries with an inverter and control formula in one unit long of a boiler. Once installed in a home, this formula is connected to the public power grid so that it can be recharged at night when electricity is cheaper. This charming source of electric power can be used the day when energy is more expensive, or even resell it to the grid, saving families money.
The garage formula can also be connected to a house’s power supply, such as a wind turbine or solar panel. He will then buy the force produced the day and use it to recharge electric cars at night.
Over the past 4 years, thousands of systems have been installed in homes across Europe. For example, the Solvang Housing Association in Norway is based on 3 garage systems, while about 20 systems are scattered off the coast of Rogaland, also in Norway. Other interesting examples come with what Nissan calls the UK’s most remote music studio, in Black Bay in Stornaway, Scotland, and an eco-friendly independent cinema, Lexi, in London.
However, the most impressive xStorage installation to date is located in the largest stadium in the Netherlands, the Johan Cruijff Arena in Amsterdam. Here, 148 new and reused Nissan Leaf batteries have been installed to provide an uninterrupted backup force of 3 MW for events.
Nissan and Eaton are not the only corporations that use second-life electric vehicle batteries to build garage systems for homes and other buildings. In 2017, Powervault, founded in the UK, partnered with Renault, as well as Nissan, to reuse Renault Zoe and Nissan Leaf batteries in their electric garage units.
Three years later, refrigerator-sized batteries, called Powervault 3eco, were deployed in many homes as well as schools across England. Talks are also underway to bring force materials to the rest of Europe.
At the same time, Powervault tested its battery generation with UK Power Networks, an electric power distribution network operator covering the south and east of England, adding London. Here, families buy power in battery packs, on which the network operator relies when it wants to build the flexibility of the local power grid, change the power call away from peak hours, and decrease the need for new substations and cables.
A little more, the company has partnered with Japan-based JXTG Nippon Oil – Energy Corporation to see how its garage sets can reach the most productive equilibrium peaks and force decreases in Japan’s electricity grid.
As Joe Warren, CEO of Powervault, says, “Our vision is that Powervault is not as unusual as a washing device or dishwasher, allowing zero-carbon energy to be stored in the house when you want it most.”
At the same time, the Swedish corporation Box of Energy has used battery modules recovered from old Volvo hybrid cars in its forced garage systems to force homes.
And Relectrify, an Australian developer of complex battery systems, integrates used Volkswagen and Nissan car electric batteries into their battery garage systems.
This year alone, Relectrify introduced its “BMS – Inverter” system, recently used in a network garage pilot assignment with Nissan North America and America Electric Power. The company says this represents a technological advancement, as it offers a very high-efficiency AC output consistent with the network through the organization of a large number of individual mobile voltage contributions into a battery pack.
The company has also partnered with New Zealand for electric power and Fuel Vector to connect its systems to the power grid and homes.
The Japanese corporate Toyota has installed used Prius hybrid batteries at 7-Eleven retail outlets in Japan to buy the strength generated through solar panels. This force is used to force beverage coolers, fried bird ovens and sausage grills at internal outlets.
These batteries, as well as mobile desktop fuel generators, are centrally controlled through construction power control systems to increase the use of renewable energy and hydrogen-derived electric energy. Small mobile fuel trucks are also used to deliver products to stores.
In its reuse and recycling of electric vehicle batteries, Nissan has partnered with Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo to install Japan’s first lithium-ion battery reuse and recycling plant in Namie, Japan, in 2018.
Operated through Nissan-Sumitomo 4R Energy joint venture, the battery modules of the Nissan Leaf electric car battery plant whose power capacity is declining. These are reassembled to shape new batteries.
Basically, 4R Energy has developed a formula to temporarily measure the functionality of used batteries that can be used at the Namie plant.
The facility can process more than 2,000 batteries consistent with the year, with the maximum effective modules used in Leaf replacement batteries.
In the meantime, smaller modules will be assembled and used in forklift, golf cart and streetlight batteries.
There’s more in Namie, the location of Nissan’s lithium-ion battery recycling and reuse plant, than it looks. The Japanese city left in 2011 after the devastating earthquake and tsunami that caused the cave of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant about five kilometres away.
Residents returned in 2017 and, for this reason, Nissan worked with 4R Energy to create a new type of LED lighting that runs without main grid power. Newly processed Leaf batteries at Nissan’s recycling and reuse plant are proven to be a must here.
Reborn Light’s task was aimed at providing the public with a new streetgentle outer solar panel to recharge a Leaf battery located at its base. The battery can force the rest of the night.
As Nissan says: “Even when batteries are no longer used to cars, they can be reborn to continue serving humans.”
Giving new life to old batteries won’t be enough. A lithium-ion battery is made of lithium, cobalt, nickel and other rare metals that will have to be extracted and extracted, testing the global source of those elements. Recycling batteries to extract those valuable fabrics for reuse is obviously critical but not easy.
While many giant pyrometallurgical or smelting plants can cobalt, nickel and copper from lithium-ion batteries, processes are expensive, energy-intensive, and cannot extract other vital materials.
However, a handful of plants have now emerged to take on the challenge with more environmentally friendly processes. For example, the electronic waste recycler TES has opened two new battery recycling facilities in Singapore and France that recover the elements using mechanical and hydro-metallurgical methods.
Each site uses self-drills and crushers to break down batteries into fine substances while in solution. Once dry, the magnetic separators recover copper and aluminum. A chemical remedy procedure is used to recover cobalt and lithium. Most importantly, the procedure does not release heavy metals or volatile biological compounds into the atmosphere.
Similarly, the new German company Duesenfeld destroys the batteries with inert nitrogen, pumping, evaporating and condensing the flammable electrolyte. Dry fabrics are separated through operators in height, weight, magnetism and electrical conductivity. During the process, cobalt, copper, nickel, lithium, manganese, aluminum, graphite and, of course, electrolytes are recovered.
Other key processing services include Akkuser in Finland, American Manganese and Battery Resourcers in the United States, Li-Cycle in Canada and Retriev, founded in Canada and the United States. Above all, recycling in these services reduces CO2 emissions and can generate more tissue than classic processes.
Duesenfeld, for its part, states that its procedure saves 4.8 tons of CO2 consistent with the ton of recycled batteries in more classic procedures and recovers 91% of the materials of a battery, just 32% for pyrometallurgical procedures.
A multitude of projects are also underway around the world to bring the processes of recycling lithium-ion electric vehicle batteries to more effective yields and lower costs.
In early 2019, the U.S. Department of Energy introduced $5.5 million worth of lithium-ion battery recycling and invested $15 million in a new lithium-ion battery recycling center, ReCell, at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.
Through these programs, U.S. researchers are preparing automated battery sorting methods, designing batteries to dismantle and inventing new processes for all internal cathode metals.
For example, the ReCell Center, a collaboration of universities and 3 national laboratories, is developing strategies to repair the lithium content of lithium-deficient cathodes at the end of their life, so that they can be reused directly in new batteries without using acid. or treatment of ovens.
Meanwhile, U.S. automotive battery collection company Clarios, a finalist for the Lithium-Ion Recycling Award, hopes to build garage sites for lithium-ion batteries and then expand technologies to extract critical fabrics for the production of new batteries.
In the UK, the Faraday Institution is funding the ReLiB project, which is looking at the best ways to develop a robust technological, economic and legal infrastructure to recycle close to 100 per cent of the materials in lithium-ion automotive batteries.
For example, researchers use robotics to safely disarm lithium, cobalt and more batteries.
In this context, Professor Paul Christensen of the University of Newcastle is running with the UK Fire and Rescue Service to expand protocols to deal with lithium-ion battery fires. “These batteries still involve large amounts of energy and at the moment we are not prepared enough to treat them when they succeed at the end of their lives,” he says. “[We have this] public protection factor that wants to be addressed as the most widely available second-life electric car batteries, so we want to take a look at the battery life cycle, from digging floor fabrics to getting rid of them again. Finish.”
Other key recycling projects are underway at CSIRO in Australia, as well as across Europe with ReLieVe, Lithorec and EU-backed AMPLiFII.
Newport
Newport (Casnewydd)
Up to £40,000
Learn more about IET cookies and how to use them.