When the first Electric Vehicles came out around 2010, when I was exploring my career opportunities in that field, the ‘problem’ of recycling was brought up. It has evolved a lot since, but some things remain.
Back then:
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There was technology to recycle, and they could achieve incredible efficiency, recovering in ±99% of all materials from a battery.
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It was expensive to recycle, more costly than it was to go out and mine the raw materials.
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The scale at which Electric Vehicles were driving around made them play a marginal role in the global battery market. Useful to think ahead, but not an acute problem yet.
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When a battery is no longer good enough for a car (for example, the available charge is only 70% of its original capacity) - it was opted to use those discarded batteries in grid-storage solutions.
Recent research which published in Nature, warns of the potential waste management problem that could happen if we do not deal with it correctly:
“The Nature article estimates that every one million electric vehicles will produce 250,000 metric tons of spent Lithium-ion Batteries during their lifetime. How to dispose such a massive amount of industrial waste in an environmentally responsible manner is a daunting challenge.” - UK Researchers Push for Automation in Recycling of Lithium-Ion Batteries to Reduce the Environmental Impact of Electric Vehicles
"One car its trash is another grid its treasure."
I do not have the current figures available, but I can imagine it is still more expensive to recycle than it is to mine new materials. Also, when looking at installed grid-storage applications, that market is far from satisfied.
It is good to develop proper recycling technology for when these batteries are genuinely ‘done’. Until then, one car its trash is another grid its treasure.
