Tag: lithium-ion battery

Post #1712: The Balkanization of EV battery recycling

 

Background:  I can’t get rid of the damned thing.

My wife and I have been believers in electrically-powered transport for some time now.

In 2008, we bought an aftermarket battery pack to convert my wife’s 2005 Prius into a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.  At the time, the manufacturer (A123 systems) assured us that the battery pack would be fully recyclable, and that they had partnered with Toxco, Inc. to guarantee that.

To be honest, that retrofit never worked very well.  It wasn’t the battery’s fault.  The main limitation was that a Prius of that generation wasn’t really built to function as an electric vehicle.  That placed a lot of limitations in driving in all-electric (“EV”) mode.  Gasoline savings were modest, at best.

Fast-forward to 2012.  A123 had gone bankrupt.  Toxco was no longer in the battery recycling business.  We had a problem with the charger on that battery pack, and decided to have it fixed, in large part because, at that time, there was no way to get rid of the damned thing.  Far less hassle to fix it and keep using it.

At that time, the word was that infrastructure for EV battery recycling was just around the corner.  But from a practical perspective, here in Virginia, we couldn’t find someone to take that off our hands and recycle it.

Fast forward to 2018, and the original nickel-metal-hydride traction battery in that Prius died.  We thought about scrapping the car at that point (177K miles), but everything else was fine, we dreaded the thought of buying a new car.  So we we paid to have the dealer install a new Toyota nickel-metal-hydride (NiMH) traction battery.  (Toyota recycles the dead NiMH batteries recovered through their dealerships.)   But, in part, the decision to keep the car was driven by that A123 battery pack.  We looked around for recyclers, but there was still no way to get rid of the damned thing.

Apparently, EV battery recycling was still just around the corner.

Jump to 2023.  It now looks like that 15-year-old A123 pack has finally given up the ghost.  It will no longer charge.  And at this point, we have no interest in trying to get it fixed, even if we could.  Any money spent on that would be better invested in getting a new purpose-built PHEV, such as a Prius Prime.

I’m sure you’ve guessed the punchline.   I just looked around for recyclers, and yet again, there is even still no way to get rid of the damned thing.

Now, that’s not 100% true.  There’s an on-line ad for a company that, if I give them all my information, might be willing to offer me a quote on how much they’ll charge to recycle my particular battery.  There might be a shop as close as North Carolina that might take it, if I could prepare it properly.  I haven’t bothered to inquire.  My wife’s going to call the dealer who installed it originally, after this three-day weekend, and see if they’ll remove it and dispose of it for us.  (Last time we asked, that wasn’t an option.)

My point is there’s no place within, say, 200 miles, that I can just call up, make and appointment, and drop off the battery for recycling.  It’s all either a custom, one-off service, or requires crating and shipping the battery, or required driving at least hundreds of miles, round-trip, if I can find a place that will take it.

On the plus side, I’m in no hurry.  A fully-discharged lithium-ion battery isn’t a fire hazard.  I’ve checked several sources on that, and that’s the overwhelming consensus.  A completely discharged lithium-ion battery is just dead weight, not a death trap.  You definitely don’t want to try to recharge one and power it up, once it has been over-discharged, as it can easily form internal short-circuits in an over-discharged state.  That can lead to a big problem in a short amount of time.  (And chargers in general will not allow you to try to charge a lithium-ion battery with excessively low starting voltage, for exactly this reason.)  But as long as you don’t do anything stupid — don’t bypass the charger, don’t puncture it, don’t roast it — it’ll remain intert.

On the minus side, it looks like the U.S. EV battery recycling industry is in no hurry, either.  I sure don’t perceive a lot of forward motion since the last time I looked at this.  Worse, what seems to be happening is that the industry is going to get split up along manufacturer lines.  Tesla will recycle Tesla batteries, Toyota will recycle Toyota batteries.  And if you fall into the cracks — with some off-brand battery — there will still be no way to get rid of the damned thing.

My impressions of the EV battery recycling market

I’ve been tracking this market for more than a decade now.  With the personal stake described above.  I thought I might take a minute to offer my observations.  In an unscientific way, without citation as to source.

First, it doesn’t pay to recycle these.  At least, not yet.  That was surely true a decade ago, and my reading of is that it’s still true.  So you’ll see people talk about the tons of materials saved, for ongoing operations.  But I don’t think you’ll hear anybody say what a cash cow lithium battery recycling is.

Second, EV battery recyclers start up and fail at an astonishing rate.  Near as I can tell, none of the companies involved in it, when I looked back in 2012, are still in that business.  I just looked up a current list of companies that cooperate with GM dealers for EV battery recycling, and all the names were new to me.  This “churning” of the industry has been fairly widely noted by industry observers.

Third, we’re still just around that damned corner.  The Biden infrastructure bill appears to have about a third of a billion dollars earmarked for development of EV battery recycling (source).

But surely you realize what that means.  See “First” above.  The fact that the Feds have to subsidize EV battery recycling is pretty much proof that it just doesn’t pay to recycle these big lithium-ion EV batteries.  At least not yet.

Finally, car markers are developing their own captive recyclers, for their own batteries.  Tesla has its own systems.  GM has contracts with a limited number of vendors, plausibly to serve GM dealerships.  Toyota has its own system, for batteries recovered by its dealerships.

That last move makes perfect sense.  Because recycling is a net cost, and yet a significant consumer concern, manufacturers are pledging to take care of their batteries, if they are recycled via their dealers.  But, so far, I’m not seeing any generic recycling capability for (say) any hybrid or EV showing up at a junkyard.  Let alone for my oddball A123 batteries.

Per this article, it currently costs Tesla more than $4 per pound to recycle its lithium-ion batteries.  At that cost, you can see why they might be willing to deal with their own, but they’re sure not going to take anybody else’s batteries for recycling.  It’s not clear that other processes — with less complete recycling of all the materials — are as costly as Tesla’s.  As of 2021, at least one company was in the business of simply warehousing used EV batteries on behalf of vehicle manufacturers, handing batteries replaced under warranty.   The theory is that right now, it’s cheaper to store them and hope for lower recycling costs down the road (reference).

I’m sure that big junkyards and scrap yards have some way of dealing with these, at some cost.  Surely plenty of the (e.g.) Generation 3 Toyota Prius hybrids with lithium-ion batteries have now been scrapped.  I don’t know if they can recycle via Toyota’s internal system, or if … well, I just don’t know.

Conclusion

All I know, at present, is that if I can recycle that totally dead 5 KWH A123 lithium-ion battery pack, it’s going to be either a hassle or a major expense or both.  As long as I can get it recycled, I will.

But, the fact is, until that 2005 Prius actually dies, I won’t have to face up to it.

And, in a nutshell, that characterizes the American market for lithium-ion EV battery recycling.

I’ve decided just to let that dead battery be, and let the 2005 Prius continue to haul around that 300 extra pounds of dead weight.

Because, as we all know, readily-available EV battery recycling is just around the corner.