Can we recycle electric vehicle batteries?
The quantity of lithium-ion batteries manufactured increased 80-fold between 2000 and 2018. In 2018, 66% of them were used in electric vehicles. The planned development of electric mobility will increase the need for batteries and the international energy agency estimates that between 2019 and 2030 the need for batteries will increase by 17.
This situation raises many questions in connection with the materials used in their manufacture: what are the resources? What are the environmental impacts of their extraction? Can we recycle them?
When looking at the lithium-ion battery materials used in the vast majority of electric vehicles today, it should first be noted that there are several battery technologies. While all contain lithium, the other constituents vary: the batteries found in phones where computers contain cobalt, those that power vehicles may contain either cobalt with nickel or manganese, or not contain any at all in the battery. case of iron-phosphate technologies.
The exact chemical composition of these storage components is difficult to identify because it is a trade secret. In addition, improvements are regularly made to batteries to increase their performance: the chemical composition of batteries therefore changes over time. Regardless, the main materials involved in the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries are lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, and graphite. All are identified as materials presenting availability risks and environmental risks.
The question of the availability of these materials is complex to grasp: on the one hand, the value of reserves is subject to geopolitical considerations and to developments in extraction techniques; On the other hand, material requirements are very sensitive to prospective assumptions (number of electric vehicles and size of their battery. Read More
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