[HN Gopher] Study: Recycled Lithium Batteries as Good as Newly M...
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Study: Recycled Lithium Batteries as Good as Newly Mined
Author : mpweiher
Score : 261 points
Date : 2021-10-19 17:45 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| kfprt wrote:
| Isn't most recycling just breaking down batteries to their
| elemental state? That would imply there couldn't possible be a
| difference between new and recycled.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| In many recycling processes it's typical that there are
| pollutants that are not cost effective to remove. You can apply
| metallurgical techniques to reclaim the metals from a battery,
| so I don't see how this would apply, but not everyone knows
| that.
| kfprt wrote:
| I don't know enough about battery chemistry specifically but
| I don't see how separating from a rich ore could be more
| expensive than a mined ore.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| There could different pollutants when you recycle batteries
| than when you take ore.
|
| I am sure there would be ways to do this but I guess
| somebody has to invest the money to figure out the process.
| And also to design things so they can be recycled easily.
| parksy wrote:
| Intuitively I agree, from a different angle although I
| don't know about chemistry either, but from a supply chain
| perspective, for generations it's all been about optimising
| delivery to a consumer. Supply lines point directly at
| households and beyond that point it's a bit of a dark web.
| Random piles of crap end up... somewhere?
|
| If the consumer became a supplier of raw recyclable
| materials, and those materials had value, they deserve to
| be compensated, and will probably be more engaged in the
| sorting and quality control processes. I drink a lot of
| beer - that makes me a great supplier of ready-made glass
| bottles to anyone that wants them. Rather than bulk
| collecting a random pile of potentially recyclable
| material, here's a bunch of sorted glass bottles each
| quarter. Anyone that can hook into that kind of idea and
| find some kind of economy of scale might make a killing.
| checker wrote:
| This concept exists in the American auto repair sector as
| core charges. I believe they work pretty well, but once
| the "core charge" becomes too insignificant then people
| will ignore it for the convenience. I suspect an
| organization as large as Apple could subsidize core
| charges for iPhone and laptop batteries.
| kfprt wrote:
| I call this entropy. Once the products are dispersed it
| takes a lot of energy to bring them back together like
| they were in the supply chain. I'm not sure it will ever
| be solved purely because of the physics.
| lrem wrote:
| I remember selling bulk quantities of beer bottles back
| to the shop as recently as 2005. A state-mandated,
| industry-wide reuse scheme would lead to them being
| examined for damage, sterilised and supplied back to
| breweries. Theoretically the scheme still works, but
| somehow the beers I buy when visiting the home country
| all come in bottles not partaking in it.
| elihu wrote:
| > The team tested batteries with recycled NMC111 cathodes, the
| most common flavor of cathode containing a third each of nickel,
| manganese, and cobalt. The cathodes were made using a patented
| recycling technique that Battery Resources, a startup Wang co-
| founded, is now commercializing.
|
| That seems like a waste of cobalt. I think modern cells are
| usually something more like NMC811 (80% nickel, 10% each of
| manganese and cobalt). You could use the cobalt from the old
| cells to make more than three times as many new cells, though
| you'd need a lot more nickel.
|
| I'm hoping most mass-market EVs switch over to using lithium iron
| phosphate, which doesn't use nickel or cobalt. Supposedly there
| are some major LFP patents expiring soon; maybe that'll increase
| the number of factories outside of China producing them.
| wffurr wrote:
| LiFePO4 also has lower energy density, and non Tesla EV makers
| seem to be making really inefficient EVs (less than 3 miles per
| kWh in the new Volvo and BMW!) and just putting in a huge
| battery pack to "compensate". Which the buyer gets the
| privilege to pay for with up front cost, charging time, and
| less range than they ought to have.
|
| I am impressed so far with my new-to-me Chevy Bolt getting 4.5
| mi/kWh and squeezing a respectable range (250 mi) out of a
| smallish battery (55 kWh).
|
| But when BMW puts in an 88 kWh battery in their i4 but it only
| gets 2.3 mi/kWh, there's no way they could accept the lower
| power density of lithium iron phosphate batteries.
| acd wrote:
| We need to design devices such as batteries for recycling and
| long life from the design phase of the products. Solid-state
| Lithium batteries will probably be easier to recycle due to no
| sandwiching. "The immediate benefit of switching from a liquid to
| solid electrolyte is that the energy density of the battery can
| increase. This is because instead of requiring large separators
| between the liquid cells, solid state batteries only require very
| thin barriers to prevent a short circuit." This separator
| material complicates recycling in conventional Lithium ion
| batteries.
|
| Instead of assuming we have endless resources we should design
| all products to recyclable from the start design phase. This is
| to lessen global warming and environmental impact.
| gotstad wrote:
| Adding to this, we should view raw materials used in production
| as something we "borrow" from the earth that must be returned.
| And the cost of returning them - through disassembly and
| recycling - should be reflected in the price of the final
| product.
|
| Right-to-repair friendly products would thus get an immediate
| advantage owing to their ease of disassembly.
| Osiris wrote:
| This. I've been thinking about this for a while.
|
| In economics we talk about externalities, or costs tht are
| burdened by society but not the producer, making prices
| artificially low.
|
| I would love to see some mechanism in place to make sure that
| firms bare the cost of externalities. In this case, maybe
| firms are required to fund the cost of recycling their
| products which would incentive them to reduce the cost of
| recycling.
|
| Yes the cost of products will go up, but in a direct
| relationship to removing the cost to society and making sure
| products are properly priced.
|
| I'm purposefully simplifying this because the actual
| methodology to make this happen is incredibly complicated.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > "The immediate benefit of switching from a liquid to solid
| electrolyte is that the energy density of the battery can
| increase. This is because instead of requiring large separators
| between the liquid cells, solid state batteries only require
| very thin barriers to prevent a short circuit."
|
| This is BS. Modern separators are microns thin.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I really hope Lithium recycling isn't like plastic recycling:
| sell it to China and then end up screwed when they stop buying
| it.
|
| Plastic recycling has pretty much been a multi-decade lie.
| Let's not bone ourselves with Lithium.
|
| Who am I kidding, humans are great at boning themselves.
| not2b wrote:
| I don't see why it would be at all like plastic recycling:
| plastic "recycling" was never practical because there are too
| many kinds of plastic and making new plastic is so much
| cheaper. When the Chinese were buying it they were
| landfilling most of it in exchange for payments to take it
| off of our hands. On the other hand, aluminum recycling works
| very well.
| lrem wrote:
| I'm slightly surprised by landfilling plastic. I hear it's
| pretty high calorie, up to the point of being energy-
| positive to burn it with filtering out the fumes. Is it
| just not enough to make this money-positive when accounting
| for handling?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| We could also stop soldering batteries to things. It's a lot
| easier to recycle a battery that can be easily removed than one
| which is permanently attached to a circuit board.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Are there places (online, or else), journals, channels about a
| more recycling minded society ? both at the average joe but
| also at the industrial/technological level ?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Absolutely. A friend - who has passed away - had a great idea:
| tax companies for resources consumed. That would go a long way
| towards treating everything that we mine as precious, rather
| than just those items that we can already see the bottom of the
| barrel on (and taking into account that mining is creating an
| enormous amount of pollution).
|
| Properly designed items should be easier, cheaper and quicker
| to recycle than to start with a mining step. One of the
| important bits here is now the various materials are joined,
| specifically, gluing is a barrier to recycling, as are various
| surface coatings. This is where I think we could make a very
| quick step in the right direction by designing not just for
| manufacturing costs but also for the cost of breaking the
| produced item up into its constituent elements.
|
| Penalties for the fraction that can not be reliable returned to
| its pre-manufacture state, as well as an automatic obligation
| to take back and recycle any product produced.
| vidarh wrote:
| It's not perfect, but Norway has a tax on drinks containers
| that is set up so that the starting point is a tax on drinks
| containers. However any drinks containers you recycle is
| offset against the tax. Then there's a government endorsed
| recycling scheme that handles all but the collection for you,
| but requires that you participate in collecting containers
| irrespective of whether you sold them or not.
|
| So the default assumption is that if you do your job, the tax
| is more of a deposit. If _you_ don 't do your job, you, or
| rather your customers are still paying, and your customers
| can drive down the cost of your competitors by helping
| increase their tax offset if you make it a hassle to return
| things at yours.
|
| By creating the presumption that you _ought_ to be able to
| collect and recycle most of the recyclable products you sell
| (return rate for cans and bottles is well over 90%), the tax
| /deposit can be set fairly high. High enough and you create
| secondary businesses taking the hassle of returns for those
| who can't be bothered (don't want to return your bottle in
| Norway? odds are someone who needs the money will fish it out
| of the trash to collect the deposit), and there's a strong
| incentive for businesses to take back anything they sell
| subject to such taxes/deposits and deliver them to whichever
| scheme is approved to offset against their tax bill.
|
| This sounds relatively close in principle to an
| implementation of what you're suggesting. with penalties etc.
| implemented basically by tallying up the tax per unit sold
| and then reducing the liability per unit recycled, so the
| penalty is simply the default if you fail to recycle.
| [deleted]
| maxerickson wrote:
| How do you price the tax?
|
| Like if you buy natural gas from a responsibly run source
| that does a good job and has low emissions and I buy it from
| some terrible company that does a shite job, do we pay the
| same tax per unit of gas consumed?
| mikewave wrote:
| One mechanism is to design the tax to be revenue-neutral
| for the average taxpayer.
|
| For example, with carbon taxes on gasoline, we can
| calculate what the average person consumes in terms of
| gasoline per year, and then calculate the outliers (people
| with super-efficient cars and people with gas guzzlers).
| Then, we establish some reasonable maximum that we think we
| can get away with surcharging the guzzlers, and establish a
| gradient. The average person is given back a tax break that
| corresponds to the surcharge they'll pay at the pump, so
| it's a wash for them; the guzzler gets the tax break too
| but ends up paying more, incentivizing everyone to be the
| efficient driver who basically gets a bonus.
|
| I think you could do the same for any kind of tax;
| establish the baseline for resource consumption efficiency
| for a particular recyclable commodity (and it will have to
| be per-commodity to make any sense at all); set up the
| incentive gradient so that companies producing more-
| recyclable-than-average goods end up getting free cash for
| doing so, hopefully offsetting the other costs associated
| with this, and companies producing things that are harder
| or impossible to recycle end up paying more.
|
| The end result is that the product for the consumer that is
| more recyclable should end up making more financial sense.
| Instead of pinning the gradient the way you do for gas
| (literally, 'what they can get away with and still get
| elected'), you'd pin it at a level where it incentivizes
| companies themselves to be purchasing recycled materials
| instead of new ones.
|
| All of the above is predicated on the material in question
| being able to be recycled without requiring more energy
| input / producing a higher carbon footprint to recycle than
| acquiring the original raw product is. There are some
| materials that it's just not worth to recycle, most of the
| time; plastic is definitely on that side for now, like it
| or not.
| djur wrote:
| You could get a lot of the way there if governments didn't
| sell or lease extraction rights at a bargain. And they do
| that for a number of reasons, but mostly because extraction
| and processing of natural resources is good for local
| economies. This is what ended up causing the "Sagebrush
| Rebellion" in the western United States, which is an ongoing
| political issue.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_Rebellion
| epistasis wrote:
| Yes, the Georgist solution is similar to what Norway has
| done with its oil resources, which have collectively made
| Norway immensely wealthy in comparison to the petroleum
| states elsewhere around the world.
|
| The difference is whether the state will be allowed to
| profit from its own resources, or is the nation under the
| thumb of a more militarily powerful nation and there
| exploited by foreign capital. We let Norway exploit its
| resources its own way, in other nations we have interfered
| mightily to better our own interests at the expense of the
| populations of the nation that owns the oil resource.
| agumonkey wrote:
| an entropy tax ?
| dsego wrote:
| Sounds like Georgism.
| asimpletune wrote:
| > tax companies for resources consumed
|
| I feel like so much could be fixed by just making things cost
| their true price.
| Gigachad wrote:
| What _is_ the true price of a resource though? You have to
| ration it out for a certain length of time, but what is the
| end date? Do we ensure we have supply for 100 years? 1000?
|
| I'm not trying to shit on the idea because I think we
| genuinely need to do something but I can't come up with any
| rational way to calculate the true cost of limited
| resources.
| Gene_Parmesan wrote:
| There was a really interesting (and disheartening) story by
| NPR this year about recycling in the US:
| https://www.npr.org/2021/04/21/987111675/video-is-
| recycling-...
|
| One of the comments made was that consumers assume recycling
| works as a kind of magical "Get out of Pollution Free" card.
| In reality, the system we have only works if there are
| companies that want to actually use the recycled materials.
| If there are none, it just gets landfilled.
|
| I bring this up because one of the things mentioned was
| Pringles cans. Everyone thinks they are recyclable. But the
| can is two sheets of cardboard glued over a thin sheet of
| aluminum. The paper companies don't want the cans because
| they don't want to somehow deglue the cardboard from the
| aluminum (time and cost expensive to process), and ditto for
| the aluminum people. So the cans just get thrown out.
|
| In fact some people make arguments that recycling programs do
| more harm than good, because they allow consumers to
| alleviate their guilt about waste without actually helping
| the environment. The cynic may say that's intentional.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The paper companies don't want the cans because they
| don't want to somehow deglue the cardboard from the
| aluminum (time and cost expensive to process), and ditto
| for the aluminum people.
|
| I'd have expected that simply melting down the stuff would
| burn off all the organic contaminants (paper/plastic/glue
| and food residue), leaving the aluminium and sludge that
| can be scooped off.
| myoon wrote:
| Probably would still be an issue with contaminating the
| aluminum with carbon and possibly other impurities. You'd
| probably need some other process to purify the aluminum
| afterwards, which likely makes it too expensive.
| Factorium wrote:
| The solution is to standardise packaging so that it can be
| re-used by multiple brands and companies, with just a clean
| out and new set of logos glued on.
|
| This might not be suitable for a Pringles can, but at least
| suitable for glass containers and bottles.
| mjevans wrote:
| The recycling process for a pringles can sounds somewhat
| simple conceptually.
|
| Coarse shred
|
| (duration???) Submerge within an artificial swamp rich in
| bacteria to digest the biological components; ideally
| capture the outputs from this loop for fuel or other bio
| processes.
|
| When completed a rich 'ore' of mixed metal shavings should
| be the result, and easier to recycle.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > consumers assume recycling works as a kind of magical
| "Get out of Pollution Free" card.
|
| Consumers were told that by the local authorities who put
| these recycling programs in place. They were not told that
| behind the scenes it all goes to the landfill anyway. If
| they knew the truth they might actually make more effort to
| reduce the amount of stuff they throw out and be more aware
| of wasteful packaging.
| 14 wrote:
| We should put a deposit on all batteries. I will admit I am
| guilty of taking my dead batteries and just throwing them out vs
| recycling them. We should incentivize the recycling of all
| batteries.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Please don't do this with batteries, they are not only toxic
| but can also be a fire hazard if not disposed of properly, this
| goes especially for Lithium-Ion based batteries.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I'm scrupulous about extracting batteries from my electronics
| for proper disposal, personally... But realistically, without
| a cash incentive to get people to pull out the screwdriver,
| many folks won't do it and they'll end up in the garbage.
|
| This needs to be a deposit-based program. E-recycle fee
| upfront at purchase, rebate at proper disposal.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Where I live such waste is collected separately (small
| chemical waste), you get a little box for it and you can
| drop it off for free at the local garbage disposal/sorting
| facility.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Similar here, but my point is that many won't do the
| hassle of extracting a screwed-in battery from an
| electronic device rather than throwing it straight into
| the opaque trash-bag. A fee-and-rebate program would
| provide a cash incentive to properly sort your batteries
| out of trash. It works for refillable liquor bottles.
| The_Beta wrote:
| Does the lithium, cobalt, etc. not undergo a material change as
| the battery is used? Meaning, is the lithium in a brand new
| battery the same as the lithium in a battery that's been used for
| years?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Lithium and cobalt are both elements. Getting them to be
| something else would require a nuclear reaction.
| bluGill wrote:
| Both chemically combine with other atoms to form molecules -
| that is how a battery works. If they combine with the wrong
| thing it can be a lot harder to separate them again (not
| nuclear level, but harder)
| mypalmike wrote:
| I would presume the question was about the physical and
| chemical state of the lithium rather than the atomic makeup.
| Like whether the lithium is ionized, whether it's a powder or
| crystallized solid, etc.
| sonium wrote:
| The stoichiometry stays exactly the same, just shred the
| battery and feed the result back to the beginning of the e.g
| cobalt mining operation operation. Better however if you
| somehow manage to roughly separate it into lithium, cobalt and
| so on and use the result instead of the respective ore.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I always thought EVs are more environmentally friendly and that
| batteries would be recycled but from what I have read that is not
| really the case. It seems that batteries are a similar scam like
| plastic recycling where industry put out a lot of propaganda to
| make people believe that things would be recycled. But in reality
| only a very small percentage gets recycled.
| pornel wrote:
| What about reuse of batteries for grid storage? Weight/capacity
| ratio doesn't matter for something sitting on the ground. I
| presume that with economics of solar you could use even almost-
| dead batteries profitably.
|
| ----
|
| EVs are still better than ICE cars, so don't take any EV
| problems as an excuse to keep producing ICE cars. E.g. even if
| the grid was entirely oil-powered, large plants burn oil more
| efficiently and cleanly than ICE, and keep emissions away from
| cities.
|
| But cars as a form factor are still inherently inefficient for
| moving people. It doesn't matter if they're electric, taxis, or
| self-driving: compared to trains they have low road throughput,
| depend on tires with much higher rolling resistance, and
| particles from tire wear are another source of pollution.
| kazinator wrote:
| What a headline, yikes! How about:
|
| Recycled Material Lithium Batteries Just As Good
| soperj wrote:
| Process being commercialized by researcher tested and found to be
| very very good by same researcher. Colour me a least a little
| skeptical here.
| hvis wrote:
| That's also what jumped out at me.
|
| Good if true, of course. But really needs independent
| evaluation.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Do you have any training in the field or is this just a
| baseless ad hominem attack? Do you have literally any evidence
| from a reputable source that the parties involved falsified
| results?
|
| Among other things, the testing was done by a different
| company, A123 systems - and his company has been selling the
| cathode material to manufacturers.
| tehjoker wrote:
| A promising sign, but the GP's points are a reason to be
| skeptical until we see evidence of scale up. There could be
| issues or limitations that are not obvious to non-experts.
| That is the case with almost every news story like this.
| scotty79 wrote:
| How's that ad hominem? He just said that single, non-
| independent research is not enough to convince him. Which is
| very reasonable thing to say.
| [deleted]
| twofornone wrote:
| No, the point was the conflict of interest, and to
| belittle a source which takes the researcher's claims at
| face value.
| AlexanderDhoore wrote:
| A certain amount of scepticism is needed if you want to
| survive on the internet :)
| parksy wrote:
| Source?
| cvs268 wrote:
| Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28922027
| HideousKojima wrote:
| "Everything you read on the internet is true" - Abraham
| Lincoln
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Exciting news but there are a lot of missing details. The
| differentiation seems to be that they can output ready to use
| cathode material (NMC) instead of raw elements, and that those
| materials may perform as good or better than new materials. I'm
| curious what this process takes in terms of energy and inputs
| like acid. And what about the rest of the battery? And then there
| are the policy and cost questions to make it all economically
| viable compared to new material.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Lead acid batteries have a high rate of recycling in part
| because there are a limited number of standardized sizes, and a
| lot of each size.
|
| EVs have not yet achieved as much volume and settled on
| standards. But that will change. Probably quickly at current
| growth rates.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And the fact that the various materials are fairly easily
| separated from each other certainly helps.
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