[HN Gopher] Old electric cars are a raw material of the future
___________________________________________________________________
Old electric cars are a raw material of the future
Author : edward
Score : 92 points
Date : 2021-05-15 07:19 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| ImNotSurprized wrote:
| This doesn't surprize me.
| JudasGoat wrote:
| Having researched Tesla battery packs, failure occurs when one
| cell goes into high resistance state. There is a Company that
| repairs battery packs by cutting the bad cell out of the circuit.
| They charge approx $5k to do this. I am guessing that low
| resistance (shorted) cells take themselves out by blowing their
| individual fuse. It seems as though addressable fuses could deal
| with this
| adammunich wrote:
| I'd love to learn more about what you dug up on this
| mastrsushi wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210515014653if_/https://www.ec...
| zafka wrote:
| Buckminster Fuller Said it quite a few years ago. If Society did
| not socialize the expense of cleaning up the environment for
| industry we would be much farther down the road to closed loop
| manufacturing.
| zafka wrote:
| For those not inclined to Google:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller
| baybal2 wrote:
| I would very much like to see where they got their breakdown.
|
| The "electrical vehicles by weight" looks pretty much like Tesla
| Model S breakdown.
|
| Tesla is alone in choosing aluminium, while the rest of the
| industry goes with steel.
|
| The engine block is the heaviest part in an ICE vehicle, but it's
| usually made of grey iron, and not really steel, with German cars
| some times using silicon-aluminium, or much rarely magnesium
| alloy.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I don't know how you come to this conclusion, but the engine
| block in a modern passenger car is definitely not the heaviest
| part. The engine block itself is often incredibly light, even a
| V8 made from cast iron would only be a few hundred pounds.
|
| The body (or unibody) of any modern car is far heavier, given
| that it has so many functions and safety features as part of
| its design.
| baybal2 wrote:
| If you count body as a part, then yes.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Not alone. The BMW i3 has an aluminum frame.
|
| The Tesla model 3 and model y are steel by the way.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| > Tesla is alone in choosing aluminium, while the rest of the
| industry goes with steel.
|
| Somebody better tell the F150 designers.
| jakobdabo wrote:
| Another raw material source are the catalytic converters [1] of
| the exhaust system. Thieves are targeting them, and there are
| "shops" where you can "donate" your converter, get a free
| emulator instead, and receive money. Which, of course, is bad for
| environment.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalytic_converter
| WJW wrote:
| Pretty much everything is a raw material of the future. Even
| household waste has much higher concentrations of metals than
| most ore deposits.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Heh was about to say this. Also, how much is the recycling
| industry can absorb the potential flood of old ICE cars ?
| WJW wrote:
| Recycling of old cars is already pretty well developed. You
| drain the old fluids and strip any parts with secondary
| market value, then compact the whole thing and tip it whole
| into a steel melting furnace.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQHKUpwMboY
| agumonkey wrote:
| yes but the rate of recycling may explode due to EVs
| (potentially)
| reader_mode wrote:
| That makes no sense - even the best case scenarios for
| EVs will take a decade to get to a significant % of
| market share - batteries and charging infrastructure
| isn't there to explode anything, AFAIK all EVs have
| waiting lists.
| alex_young wrote:
| Especially when one of the lithium packs winds up in the
| furnace.
| WJW wrote:
| Given the rate at which these electric arc furnaces
| convert electricity into heat already, I don't think that
| a few hundred gigajoule extra from a random battery pack
| is going to matter all that much.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| Also, I expect that an industry that deals with removing
| eleventy seven airbags to keep the children safe can
| handle main battery removal.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Battery explosions are common in waste management
| facilities. It's a problem.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Unlikely due to secondary market value, unless there's
| another wave of "scrapping subsidy" schemes. More likely
| to be exported.
| toast0 wrote:
| This is from battery life concerns right? If the battery
| pack lasts around ten years and replacement costs more
| than the car, it'll get junked, etc.
|
| It seems like battery lifetime may be better than
| expected (except in arizona, especially if your battery
| doesn't have sufficient cooling). And there hasn't been a
| lot of reporting of this happening, I haven't seen many
| anecdotal reports either. Maybe, it's still too early.
|
| This is a big (underreported) factor in CNG vehicles
| though, a lot of their fuel tanks are expiring now, and
| for at least some vehicles, it's not economical to
| replace the tank, and at least PG&E requires a safety
| report before authorizing people to use their stations,
| so that makes a car junk simply because you can't fuel
| it.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Nope, not at all, I meant the old population of ICE that
| may rapidly end up in landfills if (if) people migrate to
| EVs en-masse.
| toast0 wrote:
| Oh, I don't think that's likely, even if we assume EVs
| are unconditionally better than ICE for all users, unless
| ICE use is meaningfully restricted (either because of
| explicit restrictions from use within important areas, or
| because the fuel network shrinks and it becomes onerous
| to refuel), ICE cars in working condition will still have
| utility and resale value, even if it goes down and even
| if new sales are all EV.
| gilbetron wrote:
| As with most places, our municipal recycling system just throws
| away most of what it receives (but that looks like it is
| changing soon-ish, maybe). My wife really virtue signals by
| wanting to recycle everything, and gets annoyed if I throw
| something that is "recyclable". I just tell her that recycling
| deprive the future waste miners of their livelihood :)
|
| I joke, but I do believe there will be "waste miners" at some
| point in the future.
| pfdietz wrote:
| In the post fossil fuel age, the waste stream will be a
| valuable source of reduced carbon for use in polymers and
| chemicals, and perhaps in specialized applications where
| chemical fuels are still needed (like long distance
| aircraft).
| plebianRube wrote:
| That sandwich you're eating? Made from old recycled half eaten
| sandwiches.
| kragen wrote:
| Actually your sandwich is made from poop.
|
| The poop fertilized plants, the plants were harvested, some
| of them were turned into bread, others fed a pig, and that's
| what you're eating. Some of the poop decayed and was released
| as gases into the air, which were then recaptured by the
| plants, by bacteria in the roots of soybeans, and by Haber-
| Bosch factories (confusingly also called plants) which made
| synthetic fertilizer to fertilize the plants further.
|
| You are recycling your sandwich, made from poop, into more
| poop.
|
| This is the reflection on the disgusting nature of food and
| its link to the interdependent arising of all things. Your
| existence is inextricably linked to the existence of the pig
| and the poop. They are not separate processes; they are
| different focuses in the same process.
| tomcam wrote:
| I save time and just eat the poop directly
| Benjamin_Dobell wrote:
| Pretty sure it's just a (slightly misquoted) Futurama
| reference.
| jahnu wrote:
| Only a tiny amount of it though. It's almost all made from
| air.
| Reason077 wrote:
| _" The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the
| iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made
| in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star
| stuff."_ --Carl Sagan
| ajross wrote:
| FWIW: Sagan was poetic but the intuition turns out to
| have been wrong. Models are still not super convincing,
| but supernovae alone aren't enough to explain the
| abundance of heavy elements. A big chunk of the rare
| earth nuclei we apply in industry today seem likely to be
| tiny remnants of neutron stars that were thrown off in a
| merger event with another neutron star or black hole.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Huh? Are humans made of heavy elements?
| saagarjha wrote:
| For astronomers, "heavy" generally means "not formed by
| stellar nucleosynthesis".
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| That's even cooler.
| loufe wrote:
| Thanks for bringing this up! I was always curious and
| decided to research it. The graphic at the top of this
| Phys article describes the origins of all elements on the
| periodic table. It claims that only a small number of
| elements were remnants of neutron stars, however.
| https://phys.org/news/2020-09-elements-neutron-stars-
| contrib...
|
| >Half of all the elements that are heavier than iron--
| such as thorium and uranium--were thought to be made when
| neutron stars, the superdense remains of burnt-out suns,
| crashed into one another. Long theorized, neutron star
| collisions were not confirmed until 2017. Now, however,
| fresh analysis by Karakas and fellow astronomers Chiaki
| Kobayashi and Maria Lugaro reveals that the role of
| neutron stars may have been considerably overestimated--
| and that another stellar process altogether is
| responsible for making most of the heavy elements.
| kragen wrote:
| Yes. Also poop.
|
| (Though the atomic nuclei didn't originate in the poop;
| they were just passing through. But cobalamin molecules,
| for example, do originate in poop pretty often.)
| amelius wrote:
| This is the same as the endless recycling of water.
| svth wrote:
| HAMLET Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a
| certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him.
| Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all
| creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for
| maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but
| variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that's
| the end.
|
| KING CLAUDIUS Alas, alas!
|
| HAMLET A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a
| king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
|
| KING CLAUDIUS What dost you mean by this?
|
| HAMLET Nothing but to show you how a king may go a
| progress through the guts of a beggar.
| kragen wrote:
| Yes, Thich Nhat Hanh uses the example of the hydrological
| cycle instead of poop: "That watermelon is made of
| clouds."
| [deleted]
| hinkley wrote:
| They should be made from poop, but it's more fossil fuels
| than poop at the moment.
|
| If you count CO2 as "poop" the percentages rise but the
| fossils still are in the lead.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _That sandwich you 're eating? Made from old recycled half
| eaten sandwiches._
|
| For reference, that's a _Futurama_ quote.
| dkarp wrote:
| People don't realise this when they think of landfill.
|
| In future, we could have an effective way of mining landfill
| for resources. Some forms of recycling now are highly
| inefficient and it's conceivable that we'd be better off
| utilizing landfill and recycling with better techniques later.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's an argument for doing roughly the recycling sorting
| we do now and then just burying it.
| coryrc wrote:
| When we extract ore from a given area, it's mixed with just a
| few different compounds. So you tailor various acids and
| processes to economically filter out just want you need. How
| do you plan to do this when you have every compound we've
| ever created with overlapping solubilities and you want pure
| output?
| kragen wrote:
| > _When we extract ore from a given area, it 's mixed with
| just a few different compounds._
|
| This is pretty far from the truth. Rock is less chemically
| complex than living plants, animals, and fungi, it's true;
| but there's a long distance from "less than hundreds of
| millions" to "just a few".
|
| The article explains how it's done in the case of lithium-
| ion batteries.
|
| It is true that to the extent that you can reduce the
| admixture of other materials, you can reduce the costs.
|
| > _How do you plan to do this_
|
| The standard mining methods include roasting, oxidation,
| and reduction (pyrometallurgy); froth flotation;
| lixiviation; defecation; crushing and grinding (milling or
| comminution); screening; and agglomeration. More exotic
| methods, some of which are crucial to one or another
| method, include vacuum sublimation, electrolysis (molten-
| salt or aqueous), amalgamation, recrystallization, and
| fractional distillation. There are also processes that
| don't fit neatly into one of these categories, such as the
| Pidgeon process. There's a good outline at https://en.wikip
| edia.org/wiki/Template:Extractive_metallurgy.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| >People don't realise this when they think of landfill.
|
| I expect you'll see increasing mining of tailings piles as
| things like gold extraction technology improves.
| loufe wrote:
| Reprocessing gold tailings for old mines with more
| effective and robust methods has been tried recently. I
| remember looking into it but IIRC the few examples I found
| had all folded. I really do hope we do get to the point
| where we can reprocess almost any solid mass into useable
| compounds, though.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think the trick will be if you can extract funding from
| the public for remediation and make your profit off of
| the materials recovered from said tailings.
|
| The thing is now you're rewarding an industry for making
| a mess in the first place, which is a bad pattern.
| kragen wrote:
| https://archive.is/FVOLK
|
| See also my comment at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27163590.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/FVOLK
| kragen wrote:
| 18 days ago, I posted
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26952544, "This battery
| waste problem has an epistemological status similar to that of
| dowsing and witchcraft." This article seems to vindicate the
| viewpoint I expressed in the comments there: electric vehicle
| waste can only pose a significant pollution problem if capitalism
| is somehow prevented from profiting from it. (There are problems
| that capitalism makes worse, but this is the kind of problem that
| capitalism is good at solving.)
|
| However, the reporters have acquired considerably more knowledge
| of the issues than I had.
|
| At that point I looked a bit into the hydrometallurgical
| processes that were available, enough to convince myself that
| there were no showstopper problems that would make recycling
| battery waste uneconomical. But I didn't know about the
| pyrometallurgical processes at all, and I found that aspect of
| the article very interesting. Nor did I know about the current
| business situation.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _only pose a significant pollution problem if capitalism is
| somehow prevented from profiting from it._
|
| This is fundamentally false.
|
| The entire issue of environmental pollution exists _because_ ,
| or when, reuse isn't profitable.
|
| If new raw materials are cheaper than reusing, then capitalism
| will _absolutely_ result in dumping old materials and
| increasing pollution.
|
| Why would you think otherwise?
| gilbetron wrote:
| You are agreeing with the OP, you know. "somehow prevented" =
| we put dumb regulations in the way or the entire process of
| lithium extraction can't be made profitable.
| crazygringo wrote:
| No, I'm disagreeing, you know.
|
| What "dumb regulations" are you referring to specifically?
|
| _Tons_ of things aren 't profitable even with _zero_
| regulations. That 's my entire point -- not profitable even
| _before_ any regulations.
|
| Though regulations also exist for some pretty important
| reasons -- like prohibiting cheap child labor, requiring
| worker safety protections, etc.
| kragen wrote:
| Yes, in many cases polluting is profitable because the
| economy doesn't internalize the negative externality of
| pollution (and Coase's Theorem fails to hold for various
| reasons). That's part of what I meant by "There are problems
| that capitalism makes worse."
|
| This is not one of those cases, precisely because (refining
| from) new raw materials is _not_ cheaper than recycling
| waste.
| greggyb wrote:
| You're arguing past one another. The parent's working
| assumption is that concentrated lithium is much cheaper to
| harvest than trace lithium in natural deposits.
|
| You seem to be assuming that it is cheaper to mine trace
| minerals than harvest from existing batteries.
|
| Absent any domain knowledge regarding the cost of these two
| sources of lithium, neither of you can presume to be correct.
|
| The only _fundamental_ thing here is that, absent any
| external pressure, in a capitalistic system, we will see
| suppliers of lithium prefer the source that is cheaper for
| them to utilize.
| kragen wrote:
| In my comment, I said, "At that point I looked a bit into
| the hydrometallurgical processes that were available,
| enough to convince myself that there were no showstopper
| problems that would make recycling battery waste
| uneconomical." That seems to be the "domain knowledge"
| you're referring to? So I didn't _presume_ I was correct; I
| investigated and _found out_ what was correct.
|
| This article has much better domain knowledge than what I
| was able to dig up at the time, though.
|
| I don't think we're arguing past one another at all. The
| central point of my comment was that people often made the
| error that crazygringo made; I explained why it was an
| error. Then, crazygringo responded, reiterating the error.
| I think my comment was rather precisely targeted at his
| comment, even though I made it earlier.
| samat wrote:
| https://outline.com/9sEHNG
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Lithium is a valuable resource. EV batteries have lots of it.
| Therefore EV batteries are valuable even after they stop working.
|
| Lithium is valuable because extracting it from naturally
| occurring salt deposits is a lot of work. These salt deposits are
| mostly not Lithium. We are talking trace amounts here. To extract
| it, you have to process vast amounts of brine. Boil of the water,
| separate it from other materials, etc. That's a lot of work and
| energy. Recycling a battery with high concentrations of Lithium
| is probably a lot less work. For that reason, lithium is a lot
| more expensive than other materials.
|
| Melting old ice cars to recover the steel is already a thing. The
| steel has a value. All you need to do is melt it and reuse it.
| So, we already have existing practices for recycling old vehicles
| and companies specializing in that. The only thing that changes
| is that those companies will be dealing with very valuable
| batteries as well. Lithium is of course quite a bit more
| lucrative than steel. If it works for steel, it's going to work a
| lot better for lithium. Because it has a lot more value.
| GordonS wrote:
| I had always assumed that when a lithium battery didn't work
| any more, the lithium was somehow "depleted", or had been
| charged chemically somehow?
| cptskippy wrote:
| As others have said, matter doesn't change.
|
| As I understand it, lithium crystals form inside the battery
| and eventually short the battery out.
|
| The lithium moves between the anode and cathode to
| release/store energy. I think when it's locked up in a
| crystal it isn't free to move and reduces the battery
| capacity as well.
| generalizations wrote:
| That would only be the case if the batteries were nuclear.
| yomly wrote:
| Matter cannot be created nor destroyed. And elemental
| conversion is a big deal - usually involving nuclear fission
| or fusion.
|
| Batteries do become depleted but the lithium never
| disappears, I guess simply put a reverse potential is no
| longer able to reverse the battery equation back to the
| energy storing state. Presumably because there is some third
| reservoir state that a potential cannot reverse (without
| delving into the chemistry).
|
| Don't be mistaken into thinking that because a charger cannot
| reverse the battery reaction that the lithium itself is gone,
| or that there does not exist some completely unrelated
| process that can recover the lithium - separate from the
| immediate battery ecosystem
| alisonkisk wrote:
| > Matter cannot be created nor destroyed.
|
| It certainly can, E=mc^2. But it's an incredible amount of
| energy for how much matter you get.
| [deleted]
| p1mrx wrote:
| E=mc^2 doesn't really say that matter can be _converted_
| to energy, just that energy has mass.
|
| For example, a fission/fusion reaction doesn't make
| matter go away, but the amount of energy released is
| large enough to be measured as a loss of mass. When you
| discharge a battery, it also loses mass, but the amount
| is too small to notice.
| [deleted]
| theelous3 wrote:
| Lithium is lithium. Idk anything about lithium batteries, but
| presuming they use some kind if lithium salt compound or
| something, it's going to be a hell of a lot easier to re-
| saltify it or otherwise rebuild the useful compound, than it
| is to try and recreate big bang conditions to make more
| lithium.
| ecpottinger wrote:
| Lithium is an element how can it be deleted?
|
| If Lithium is chemically changed what prevents it being
| chemically changed back?
|
| Batteries are sealed, if material does not leave than all the
| components used to make it are still inside the battery.
| jeffbee wrote:
| > If Lithium is chemically changed what prevents it being
| chemically changed back?
|
| Thermodynamics. It is also tremendously difficult to get
| your gasoline back after you burned it, or to un-cook an
| egg.
|
| It is not difficult to recover lithium from a battery, but
| in general do not assume that physical processes are easily
| reversed.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| The energy you get from burning gasoline is about as much
| as the energy cost of creating it. It's not a complex
| organism like an egg.
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/turning-
| carbon-di...
|
| The only reason it's not done is because already made
| gasoline is cheaper.
| jeffbee wrote:
| That whole article is about how even with zero-cost
| energy it would still be double the expense of fossil
| fuels. Nobody doubts that you can make liquid fuels from
| solar energy and atmospheric CO2 ... that is a plant's
| life. The problem is it's hilariously inefficient.
| GordonS wrote:
| It's not something I ever gave conscious thought before
| now, but yes, the depletion assumption sounds a bit silly
| in retrospect.
|
| If the lithium has changed chemically, presumably the
| feasibility of changing it back depends on the nature of
| the change.
| eloff wrote:
| Outside of nuclear reactions, elements are not created or
| destroyed.
|
| What happens in old batteries is the physical structure of
| the lithium metal is damaged so it does not function as well
| as a battery, but you can separate out the lithium from the
| old battery, melt it down and reform it into a new battery
| (or whatever else you want to do with lithium.)
| pfdietz wrote:
| Lithium ion batteries don't contain lithium metal. The
| lithium is always in the +1 oxidation state.
| eloff wrote:
| To me oxidized metal is a metal, but then that's why I'm
| not an expert in that field by any stretch of the
| imagination.
| samatman wrote:
| Metals are always metals, but they are only _metallic_ in
| the fully reduced state. So we say "metallic iron" and
| so on.
|
| So an oxidized metal isn't "a metal" on the macro scale,
| because it isn't metallic.
| coryrc wrote:
| Aluminum is a metal but we don't consider ceramic
| (aluminum oxide) to be a metal.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Close, the typical problem is that the cation of the lithium
| compound used in the cathode (LiFePO4, LiCoO2, etc) becomes
| oxidized or otherwise degraded in a way that the
| electrochemical reaction can't reverse. In an LiFePO4
| battery, you might get some iron oxide. In a traditional lead
| and sulfuric acid battery, you get lead sulfate crystals.
| There's typically the exact same amount of lithium present
| (it doesn't become gaseous and float away) but its
| constituent elements are unavailable for electrochem.
| samatman wrote:
| The most common failure mode is actually dendrites growing
| off the cathode and puncturing the thin layers of of the
| cylindrical battery. Typically these are cobalt or iron,
| depending on the chemistry.
|
| Note that I'm discussing _failure_ of a cell, not slow
| degradation in its ability to hold a charge, which has a
| variety of causes including the one you sketched out.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| The atoms never leave the battery. There is no exhaust. It
| just works less well because it crystalizes in the wrong
| form. Which is a process that is trivially reversed.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > a process that is trivially reversed.
|
| If it's trivial, shouldn't lithium recycling have been
| profitable from the moment we started making lithium
| batteries?
| saltcured wrote:
| I think they mean trivial compared to processing raw ore.
| The general assumption is that you are seeing the normal
| delay effects or inertia of the economy. Capital is
| already invested in mining and ore processing. Recycling
| needs to appear economically worthwhile for a long enough
| period for investors to grow interested and take the
| plunge in this new direction.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Processing ore is easier, because you can run tons of ore
| through an industrial process, and not have to dismantle
| microscopic pieces of each battery
| saltcured wrote:
| Note, I am neither a battery nor recycling expert here,
| but am somewhat interested in dragging unstated arguments
| to the surface!
|
| I think proponents of this economic view of recycling
| often argue that you could mechanically shred/grind such
| post-consumer products into a big mess and think of it as
| a new type of high-density ore. It might take different
| refining stages, but they seem to have faith that
| industrial processing can be invented for these materials
| and that it ought to be less energy intensive than
| processing the very low density ores found in nature.
| ajross wrote:
| FWIW: the metal components of lithium batteries (especially
| cobalt) tend to be the economically limiting resources, not the
| lithium itself. But the point is valid: batteries are indeed
| harder to recycle than bulk steel, but relative to the cost of
| extracting new materials recycling is _far_ more effective
| economically.
|
| Also: it's not like EVs don't have steel chassis. It's (very
| roughly) the engine block and transmission mass that gets
| replaced by a battery. Once you remove that battery, the
| vehicles recycle identically. The only question is about how
| effective battery recycling is or can be (and it's pretty good
| already!)
| niblettc wrote:
| It actually is that many vehicles don't have a steel chassis.
| The Model Y for instance has an aluminum chassis to save
| weight. There even other materials such as Carbon Fiber used
| in some high end vehicle.
| cptskippy wrote:
| The rear underbody of the Y is aluminum but it still has a
| steel chassis. Aluminum can never fully replace steel
| because it lacks the strength and rigidity.
|
| Regardless, aluminum is expensive to extract and refine,
| requiring a tremendous amount of energy. In terms of cost,
| on average aluminum is more expensive than steel.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The vast majority of current lithium supply comes from hard
| rock mining, not brines. Brines were about half of lithium
| supply ten years ago but as the industry took off the amount of
| hard rock mining in Australia has radically expanded (by 500%).
|
| An EV battery pack does not contain a spectacularly high
| concentration of lithium. A state-of-the-art battery pack might
| by 2% lithium. That's higher than subsurface brines, but not
| miraculously high. Brine mining also throws off lots of
| valuable products other than lithium. You can get potash,
| boron, magnesium, and other valuable ores from the same brine,
| so it can be hard for recycling to compete economically.
| swiley wrote:
| "Recycling" lithium batteries is already one of the preferred
| methods for acquiring lithium by armature chemists.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| How does an amateur safely do this? I've never heard much
| about amateur chemists...
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > Lithium is a valuable resource. EV batteries have lots of it.
| Therefore EV batteries are valuable even after they stop
| working.
|
| A Tesla battery weighs about 500 kg and has about 10kg of
| Lithium (2%). The Lithium is worth about $130, whereas the
| battery costs more than $10,000. It's difficult to extract the
| trace elements of lithium from the thousands of individual
| cells honeycombed together in the battery, so there is no known
| way of getting at that Lithium via processes that are even
| comparable to the value of the lithium recovered. That's why no
| one does it.
|
| A car, on the other hand, is 55% steel by weight, and there are
| relatively straightforward ways of getting that steel (no, the
| _car_ is not "melted down". The steel components are melted
| after they are removed from the car). That's why steel in cars
| is recycled but Lithium in batteries is not.
|
| The issue with recycling is the cost of extraction -- yes,
| catalytic convertors and old computers contain trace elements
| like platinum (maybe $2 per catalytic convertor) but extracting
| it is far too expensive. So merely the presence of an expensive
| element in a manufactured good does not mean it is economic to
| extract the element. In the vast majority of situations, it's
| not.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| > yes, catalytic convertors and old computers contain trace
| elements like platinum (maybe $2 per catalytic convertor) but
| extracting it is far too expensive.
|
| Catalytic converters can be worth $100s as scrap. They're
| regularly stolen from parked cars.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Right, but not for the platinum, which is worth only about
| $2. Similarly, I'm not saying no that no one will find a
| way to get scrap value out of a used $10,000 battery, but
| it's not going to be for the $130 of lithium inside it.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| I agree with you on the lithium - it is far too abundant.
| It seems that most of the value in a catalytic converter
| is in the palladium and rhodium, though the platinum is
| worth something too. Catalytic converter chemistries vary
| a lot too, with some omitting platinum and some omitting
| palladium.
|
| Globally, the catalytic converter industry uses about 112
| tons or platinum, 170 tons of palladium, and 21 tons of
| rhodium per year. And an individual catalytic converter
| uses 1-2g for a small car up to 12-15g in a big truck.
| (Elsewhere I've seen 3-7g as an average for a US
| catalytic converter.)
|
| https://www.thermofisher.com/content/dam/tfs/ATG/CAD/CAD%
| 20D...
|
| So from what I can tell, an average catalytic converter
| contains about 5g of PGM's which works out at:
|
| 1.85g of platinum at $40/g = $74
|
| 2.80g of palladium at $95/g = $361
|
| 0.35g of rhodium at $900/g = $315
|
| The Washington post reports that catalytic converter
| thefts are largely driven by the rhodium they contain
| (the price of which has gone up enormously because it is
| a byproduct of platinum mining and platinum itself is not
| currently worth mining.)
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/catalytic-
| conver...
| [deleted]
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