Let there be battery recycling... and there was!
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that only 5% of Li-ion batteries are recycled. Right? Wrong! It's already over 90%. This week on Cleaning Up I sat down with battery guru Hans Eric Melin.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that only 5% of Li-ion batteries are recycled. Right? Wrong, in fact the figure is already over 90%
In this week’s episode of Cleaning Up, I sat down with all-round battery recycling guru Hans Eric Melin. Hans Eric is one of the unsung heroes of the net zero transition, without doubt, and it’s an eye-opening episode. Definitely one to listen to or watch!
A few takeaways for me:
The figure of 5% recycling is wrong, but it is wrong for a reason. There is two large group of people who want to believe it, true or false and who propagate it. People who hate the idea of electric vehicles and use any argument to impede their uptake; and people who love the idea of electric vehicles and want to make out that there are still vast unoccupied business opportunities.
If you want to talk about recycling of batteries or anything else, you have to be really precise in your use of language.
Collection rate - how many batteries that should’ve been collected were collected
Recyling rate - of those collected, how many were recycled, rather than junked or left to rot in warehouses.
Recycling efficiency - how much of the battery material gets recovered, on average, by weight
Recovery rate - for any particular element/material - lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, graphite, etc - what percentage gets recovered
Purity - will the material be pure enough at the end of the recycling process to use in a new application, or will it need further refining
A lot of batteries are not recycled, either because they sit inside an old appliance or car and it’s not clear they have reached the end of life, or because the appliance or car just keeps being used even though the battery has degraded, or because the whole battery, or the module, or individual cells can be repurposed.
So we have the bizarre situation where the world thinks batteries cannot be recycled when the reality is that existing battery recycling capacity is only 25% or 30% used because batteries are not reaching their end-of-life in sufficient volumes!
Finally, Hans Eric confirmed something that I have talked about in the past: forever battery minerals. If you can recover 90% of any critical mineral in a battery on recycling, that critical mineral can continue delivering the same or more energy storage services for as long as the new battery you make at each iteration is at least 10% more energy dense than the one recycled.
The bottom line is that far from being the achilles heel of electrification, battery recycling is the secret weapon. We can seriously imagine a world in which we have mined enough critical minerals to maintain a circular flow in the global economy. Not for the next few decades, for sure, but eventually. That is what happens when you #StopBurningStuff!
Make sure you don’t miss the episode with Hans Eric Melin. And be sure to subscribe to www.CleaningUpPod.Substack.com so you never miss an episode and you receive these little summaries.
Sure seems to me my posts are being canceled without notice or explanation.
If not by Substack by individuals.
That’s not in keeping with SubStacks free speech attitude.
Not my fault GHE/GHG/CAGW “climate science” is indefensible crap.
“The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.”-Carl Sagan
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
—Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996)
Water vapor, clouds, ice, snow create 30% albedo which makes the Earth cooler not warmer.
W/o GHE there is no water and Earth goes lunarific, a barren rock ball, 400 K lit side, 100 K dark refuting a warming GHE.
“TFK_bams09” GHE heat balance graphic and ubiquitous clones don’t balance plus violate LoT.
Kinetic heat transfer processes of contiguous atmospheric molecules render a surface black body and it’s “extra” upwelling GHE energy impossible.
GHE is bogus and CAGW a scam so alarmists must resort to fear mongering lies, lawsuits, censorship and violence.