[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 : 606 points
Date : 2021-10-19 17:45 UTC (1 days 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.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| Metals are really easy to reclaim and the energy required
| to separate nearly pure metal from some minor
| contaminants is a lot lower than separating it from ore.
|
| If anything, recycling batteries is one of the most
| obviously beneficial things to do. Works for lead, and
| recycling aluminum cans was also cost effective (when you
| get rid of the cost of collecting the cans). Glass is
| also cost effective.
| 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.
| earleybird wrote:
| It worked for the last starter I bought :-)
| 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.
| elihu wrote:
| LFP has lower energy density, but it's still good enough to
| be usable, and the technology keeps getting better. I think
| recently-made LFP cells tend to be somewhere around 150
| wh/kg, which is equivalent to older-generation regular
| lithium-ion cells. Tesla has been using LFPs in some of their
| model 3s; I'm not sure if that's just their China-market
| version or if that's worldwide.
|
| I think LFP is a good option for getting mass-produced EVs to
| the point where they're approximately cost-competitive with
| gas-powered cars. Energy density isn't amazing, but the
| materials they're made from are cheaper and more readily
| available, they're easier to recycle, they can last a very
| long time, and they're quite a bit safer.
|
| I expect regular lithium ion will continue to be used in
| high-end vehicles until some battery technology comes along
| that's better and cheaper, or cobalt and nickel get so
| expensive that it's not worth the cost.
|
| That's interesting that the BMW is that much less efficient
| than a Chevy Bolt. I wonder if that's due to aerodynamics,
| weight, drivetrain efficiency, or something else?
| wffurr wrote:
| Mostly weight I imagine. The BMW is 1500lb heavier.
|
| I agree that LFP ought to be usable, but only if automakers
| step up their efficiency to match.
| Animats wrote:
| Chevy Bolt: 1,625 kg
|
| BMW i4: 2,290 kg
| wffurr wrote:
| That's exactly it. For the same passenger space, less cargo
| space, and what...? BMW fit and finish? It boggles the
| mind.
|
| The BMW would get a _350_ mile (560km) range at 4 mi /kWh,
| which is clearly attainable.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| There's videos on youtube of people fixing their electric bikes,
| by replacing a dead cell in the battery. This is probably the
| most common problem.
| 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.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| >Yes the cost of products will go up
|
| If someone told me all this $3T extra spending in the US
| was to offset the costs of producing a more Circular
| Economy then I'd agree it would be a future generation's
| money well spent for good reasons.
| 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.
| [deleted]
| mc32 wrote:
| I believe that the auto industry had an aim for "green
| manufacturing" by 2000. The idea was to build cars such that a
| car could be taken apart as easily as it was put together on
| the assembly line (no crushing or inceneration, in other
| words), this would enable easy recapturing of recyclable
| components. But apparently this was more a pipe dream than
| reality as far as I can tell.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The situation has definitely improved since the 80's, but
| there is a long, long way to go to reach the original goal.
| collegeburner wrote:
| Seems like cars are much less reparable than those from the
| 80s which are then worse than 60s. Electronics are part of
| this, but so is making cars lighter, more integrated, more
| fuel efficient. Old cars it is e.g much easier to do a
| tranny rebuild, new ones they are too damn sensitive and
| its much harder, and this extends to doing basically any
| repair. If larger laptops that are easier to repair are
| good for consumers you'd think so would cars like that, but
| no, fuel efficiency must trump all.
| mc32 wrote:
| There are car mfgs where you have to maintain pretty
| strict voltages as you reprogram modules else they will
| brick themselves. They want to prevent Garage Joe or Jane
| from fixing his or her own car and instead have them go
| to the dealership and prevents owners from using used
| parts -so less "green".
| 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?
| nitrogen wrote:
| Some places do have energy and material recovery
| facilities next to their landfills that try to extract
| useful metal and useful energy from trash.
| dnautics wrote:
| I believe Japan does this, but there are dioxins all over
| the place there.
| fomine3 wrote:
| Dioxins were become problem in 90s so smaller incinerator
| is banned and now incinerators must run on high
| temperature (> 800C) for not to emit dioxins. Emissions
| are also must be measured.
| londons_explore wrote:
| There are plenty of manmade chemicals that don't break
| down at 800C. For example F-C bonds...
|
| We really ought to be incinerating things at 3000C, but
| so far we haven't been able to engineer machines to do
| this without melting themselves...
| m0zg wrote:
| IIRC it's not "recycling" at all - they'd just bury the
| plastic in China instead of here. Much like we've "reduced
| emissions" by moving all industrial production to China which
| is almost completely un-regulated in terms of emissions until
| 2030. It's as though people think that atmospheric emissions
| are somehow confined to the country which emits them, rather
| than affect the entire planet.
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The majority of Lithium-Ion batteries are spot welded rather
| than soldered (soldering injects a lot of heat), which makes
| recycling battery packs a rather time consuming and annoying
| job. The best is probably to grind them up and then to create
| a sludge and do a sort by centrifuge or some other bulk
| method of processing the materials.
|
| A typical Lithium-Ion cell contains Aluminum, steel, possibly
| a protection circuit (fibreglass, electronics components),
| carbon, copper, an electrolyte with lithium in solution and
| quite probably other elements besides.
| 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 ?
| teamonkey wrote:
| Not exactly what you're after, but
| https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/
| 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.
| adamparsons wrote:
| Handful of states and territories in Australia are doing
| this, and while I like the idea I haven't found a single
| person who has returned their bottles (including myself),
| instead just absorbed the additional cost into their
| expenses.
| vidarh wrote:
| Then it's not high enough.
|
| The cost needs to be high enough to either get really
| high return rates and/or to cover the costs to society of
| undoing whatever damage is done by what is left.
|
| Note that a key part is also that the most convenient
| option offered to comply needs to be to participate in
| recycling.
|
| In Norway you hand bottles or cans in pretty much
| _anywhere that sells them_. Which means most people just
| bring them in next time they go to the grocery store.
|
| If you require people to bring them to special recycling
| locations you should expect return rates to plummet.
| dnautics wrote:
| This is basically what bottle deposits are in the US.
| antifa wrote:
| It looks like the closest bottle deposit state is at
| least 500 miles away from me.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| In some of the US, not all of the states have it (e.g.
| near where I live Oregon has a bottle deposit, Washington
| doesn't).
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's a pretty good implementation of the concept.
| [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.
| adrianN wrote:
| No resource is truly finite except for energy, so there
| are upper bounds for the cost of "finite" resources.
| Pretty much all things that we dig out of the ground
| don't leave the planet when we're done with them, they
| just get diluted. So the cost of throwing it away is
| upper bounded by the cost of extracting the material from
| a dilute source, e.g. the ocean. That's usually
| prohibitively expensive.
| asimpletune wrote:
| I think that's the real question. How much does it cost
| to add a bunch of packaging that serves no purpose other
| than to sell the item? I have no idea.
|
| At the same, I don't think doing nothing at all a good
| alternative. If anything I don't even think this is the
| biggest obstacle. That's probably the fact that literally
| no country in the world wants to volunteer to put
| themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> I think that 's the real question. How much does it
| cost to add a bunch of packaging that serves no purpose
| other than to sell the item? I have no idea._
|
| I think that it has been established that the cost of
| packaging is smaller than the marginal increase in
| profits from greater sales (from the perspective of the
| manufacturers and retailers).
|
| In theory, an AR-heavy economy could displace packaging
| costs with AR facsimiles overlaid on generic (even
| standardized) packaging, but I don't think that would be
| a win, energy-wise.
| Gigachad wrote:
| At least the future is online sales which do not need
| fancy packaging. Although they do often involve an extra
| plastic shipping bag.
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| But that process by itself is always going to be more
| energy efficient than winning the aluminum from bauxite
| ore.
|
| Of course you need a purification step after dealing with
| scrap, but aluminum scrap, even when contaminated is
| quite valuable, basically the price is a function of how
| pure it already is.
| 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.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Fifty years ago, soda was generally sold in returnable
| glass bottles, which would be trucked back to the
| bottling plant, sanitized, and reused. But that was too
| inconvenient, I guess. First came thin glass disposables,
| and then plastic took over. At least aluminum cans (and
| steel, for that matter) are readily recyclable.
|
| Coca-Cola bottles had their originating bottling plant
| stamped into the bottom.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >Fifty years ago, soda was generally sold in returnable
| glass bottles
|
| It still is in India (at least sometimes). I suspect
| rising labour costs killed this industry, though. Why
| take on a logistical challenge you don't have to?
| YokoZar wrote:
| The energy and water costs of cleaning and sanitizing
| reusable containers can be very substantial. It seems
| nicer to "reuse" a bottle, but it may genuinely be the
| case that it's less impactful to just make a new one
| (preferably out of recycled materials).
| katbyte wrote:
| isn't that just because the externalized costs of plastic
| disposables are passed along to society and the
| environment rather then paid by the
| manufacturer/consumer?
| kragen wrote:
| It depends greatly on how you estimate those externalized
| costs.
|
| A plastic soft-drink bottle
| https://www.polisanhellas.com/products-pet-preform.html
| is about 30 grams of extremely chemically inert material,
| produced for a tiny energy cost from about 30 grams of
| crude oil, that goes to a landfill and stays there for,
| probably, millennia. So a single barrel of oil makes
| about 5,000 plastic bottles. Each bottle embodies about
| 1200 kJ of energy from oil that would otherwise have been
| burned. So whatever the externalized costs of drilling,
| refining, and shipping a barrel of oil are, it's about a
| five-thousandth of that. If you incinerate the bottle in
| the end, you get that saved-up energy back, at the risk
| of producing pollution from other things in the furnace.
|
| Of course, blow-molding the bottle takes energy; you have
| to heat those 30 g of plastic up to 125deg, but that only
| takes about another 4.5 kJ per bottle. Another similar
| amount was spent to injection-mold the preform. The
| actual work of blowing is even less, under 0.1 kJ.
| Similarly for shipping, molding machine operation,
| machine maintenance, catalysts, and so on.
|
| (A potential hole in this analysis is that I don't really
| know the energy costs of the whole terephthalic acid
| synthesis and polymerization process. They can't be
| enormously higher than the cost of molding, but they
| might be a lot lower or a little higher.)
|
| Contrast that with washing a glass bottle. You can't
| really wash a 500-m glass bottle with less than about a
| liter of water, and to sterilize it you need that water
| to be at least 60deg, preferably more like 90deg. Heating
| water from 25deg to 60deg takes 35 calories per gram; at
| 4.2 J/cal, that's 150 kJ.
|
| (I think in actual fact the energy to reuse a glass
| bottle is about an order of magnitude higher than this.)
|
| You _also_ have to take into account the energy to _make_
| the glass bottle: you 're heating 500 grams of raw
| materials (or maybe cullet) up past, typically, 1200deg,
| which takes maybe 700 kJ, depending on the materials'
| specific heats and enthalpies of fusion. This gets
| amortized over the number of reuses of the bottle.
|
| What about disposal? Proper disposal of a 500-gram glass
| bottle uses 15 times as much landfill space as a 30-gram
| plastic bottle (just as it costs 15 times as much to
| ship) but in any case there is no shortage of landfill
| space, and neither type of bottle occupies an appreciable
| percentage of existing landfills. _Improper_ disposal for
| glass bottles is much worse, as you know if you 've ever
| stepped on a broken glass bottle underwater at the beach.
| Chemically, both materials are very inert and nontoxic.
| (Microplastics are almost entirely from washing synthetic
| fibers, not from plastic bottles.)
|
| So, making a plastic bottle takes on the order of 10 kJ
| of energy, while washing a glass bottle for reuse takes
| more like 150 kJ, and similarly shipping glass around
| externalizes 15x as much of each cost. Neither one has
| significant disposal externalities, except in the rare
| case of improper disposal, in which case broken glass is
| dangerous.
|
| The crucial question, then, is how you weight the raw-
| material extraction externalities for the plastic bottle,
| and whether you incinerate it; because if _drilling,
| refining, and shipping oil_ is the most significant
| externality (oil spills, bribing Nigerian officials,
| arresting Native American protestors asserting a
| sovereign right to block the Keystone pipeline, US
| invasions of Iraq), then the plastic bottle is about 7x
| worse. Unless you incinerate it instead of burying it in
| a landfill, in which case suddenly its oil consumption
| drops to zero, making it much better again. On the other
| hand, if the most significant externality is something
| related to _burning_ oil or other fuels, like global
| warming, _washing_ the glass bottle is 15x worse than
| throwing it out and replacing it with a plastic bottle.
| Unless your hot-water heater is solar or geothermal. Then
| again, you can run a blow-molding plant on solar energy,
| too.
|
| (There are other questions of pollution; both glassmaking
| and PET-making can produce pollution, but it's not
| intrinsic to either process, so which process produces
| more pollution is largely a matter of how mismanaged it
| is. However, by virtue of dealing with 15x larger
| quantities of material, glassmaking is at a disadvantage
| here.)
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Improper disposal for glass bottles is much worse, as
| you know if you've ever stepped on a broken glass bottle
| underwater at the beach.
|
| Is it? After a short time the glass is smoothed by the
| sand/sea/rock and is fairly low impact.
| kragen wrote:
| Only at the beach, unless by "a short time" you mean
| centuries to millennia. In any other context (in the
| forest, by the side of the highway, in a river, in the
| desert, buried in your backyard) the glass can remain
| dangerously sharp for at least millennia and in some
| cases billions of years.
|
| Of course there are natural sharp rocks, too, just like
| there's natural asbestos and natural hydrogen sulfide.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I really enjoyed the analysis (as another commenter
| mentioned).
|
| One quibble: > Proper disposal of a 500-gram glass bottle
| uses 15 times as much landfill space as a 30-gram plastic
| bottle (just as it costs 15 times as much to ship)
|
| It only costs 15x as much to ship if weight is the
| driving factor in shipping. For a lot of surface shipping
| methods, dimensional measures govern the shipping prices
| either entirely or substantially. (No one is flying empty
| bottles as part of their supply chain.) It might be 2x as
| much, but it's not going to be 15x if both pallets of
| bottles take up the same space.
| kragen wrote:
| You're right about that, although for the same reason
| plastic bottles are usually blow-molded from preforms in
| or near the bottling plant, to avoid shipping bulky empty
| bottles around.
|
| Also glass is denser than PET, so 15 times as much mass
| is really only like 6 times as much volume in the
| landfill.
| jusssi wrote:
| > You can't really wash a 500-m glass bottle with less
| than about a liter of water, and to sterilize it you need
| that water to be at least 60deg, preferably more like
| 90deg. Heating water from 25deg to 60deg takes 35
| calories per gram; at 4.2 J/cal, that's 150 kJ.
|
| A tiny nitpick. I'm quite sure you can use that same
| liter of hot water to wash multiple bottles. And even
| then any facility that washes bottles at scale would use
| the leftover heat from waste water to heat the fresh
| water.
| kragen wrote:
| I think you're right--and, unless you wash the bottle by
| hand before sending it to the recycling center, that's
| not a "tiny nitpick," it demolishes my whole thesis. But
| maybe the "thesis" was already so full of caveats as to
| be fairly demolished in the first place, unless you
| reduce it to "it depends".
| dsign wrote:
| Oh man, I love this analysis.
| chillwaves wrote:
| If that is the case, then sure, do so. But no effort is
| being made. And in the case of disposables, they can be
| made to have less impact on the environment, in both
| production and decomposition stages.
| whoisburbansky wrote:
| https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-
| misled-... Doesn't seem like cynicism when that was
| explicitly the point of recycling marketing.
| ootsootsoots wrote:
| It would be nice if public education spent most of its
| time on relativity and network effects, logical fallacy,
| as part of the elementary school stage.
|
| Packaged for less developed emotional processors anyway.
|
| Exposing the technique of misinformation acts as an
| inoculant and reduces network effects of bad arguments: h
| ttps://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journ
| al...
|
| For example; imo we live in a friendlier Soviet state,
| with state sanctioned limits (quotas) on millions of
| peoples agency via the lack of public will to focus on
| local issues, and focus on neoliberal economic agendas.
|
| In collusion with state power, billionaires live large on
| our effort and denigrate our frustration, as if they're
| scientifically entitled to their figurative life of
| power, even though advertising and marketing have relied
| on government research into neuroscience and behavioral
| economics.
|
| Off topic from the original post but trying to make a
| point in a thread about propaganda. Peace.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| In Japan, consumers are responsible for disassembling their
| waste when recycling. Something like that could work for
| the USA, though I'm not sure if Japan's more involved
| system actually gets better results than other countries.
| For example, https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/
| articles/entry.... indicates that much of the recycling is
| oriented around energy production than actual material
| reuse.
|
| Obviously we should expect energy/material loss when
| recycling (meaning, each time something is recycled it
| should require inputs), but perhaps we can get those
| numbers down more and more as time goes on.
| ryan_lane wrote:
| Don't less the elaborate consumer sorting fool you. Japan
| burns everything except for PET, glass and metals.
|
| They make you separate plastics because in some areas
| they burn the plastics separately in ways that attempt to
| reduce the pollution from burning it.
| 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.
| spicybright wrote:
| Think you're making a lot of leaps here, unless you're
| very knowledgeable of how recycling works in practice...
| jacquesm wrote:
| First off, you don't have a custom process for every
| random bit of packaging out there, even those that occur
| as frequently as pringles cans. Second, even if you did,
| you'd have a massive sorting problem on your hand and
| those custom lines to deal with each and every products
| packaging would require an awful lot of space, energy and
| other resources to cope with.
|
| So as nice as this idea sounds it is not really workable
| in practice.
|
| The way it does work is indeed, shredding, then float
| tanks to separate the lighter materials from the heavier
| ones, then some more stepwise improvements (for instance:
| to separate out the steel from other metals) and finally
| compaction and what comes out the other end gets passed
| on to companies willing to pay for it, and if there is no
| market, which get paid to deal with the resulting
| sludge/scraps/goo.
|
| Recycling is not nearly as orderly a process as
| manufacturing is, and there will always be a residue that
| simply can not be dealt with economically. Properly
| designed packaging takes that into account at the time of
| manufacture to ensure that the residue is as small a
| fraction as possible.
|
| This is a hard problem, and in the longer term, next to
| climate change one of the hardest ones that we will need
| to tackle. The good news is that we could start today.
| kragen wrote:
| The resulting sludge is in many cases much richer in
| valuable (but dangerous) heavy metals than the ores we
| mine the heavy metals from, as well as a few lighter
| elements like lithium. Maybe the way to handle this is to
| split it up into one-tonne or ten-tonne chunks, seal each
| one in a few millimeters of polypropylene, and bury them
| in carefully recorded secret locations: in abandoned
| underground mines, quarries, wilderness areas, on the sea
| floor. Then, you can sell the coordinates of these secret
| locations to would-be miners--maybe not in 02021 but in
| 02061 or 02121. Seeking investors with long time
| horizons!
|
| More realistically, there isn't really any risk of
| running out of landfill space for product packaging at
| anything similar to current consumption levels. If a
| person ate a 50-gram can of Pringles and a 30-gram bottle
| of Coke every day, they'd have 29 kg of packaging at the
| end of the year, or 29 liters, which compact down to a
| 40-cm-diameter sphere.
|
| I used to periodically visit an ecovillage that handled
| their (much smaller than normal) packaging waste in this
| way: they would tamp it into two-liter Coke bottles with
| a piece of rebar as a tamper, and when the bottle was
| full, they would cap it, plaster it over with adobe, and
| use it as a construction brick. A 6 m x 18 m house with
| 300-mm-thick walls 3 m tall contains 43 m3 of wall volume
| which can be mostly filled with this kind of stuff: 150
| person-junk-food-years of packaging.
|
| 8 billion people doing this would produce 23 million
| cubic meters of packaging per year, which sounds like a
| lot, but it's an 800-meter-diameter sphere. Lake Superior
| is 12000000 million cubic meters, so it would take those
| 8 billion people half a million years to fill it up with
| this packaging, if carefully weighted to keep it from
| floating, of course.
|
| So, I don't think recycling packaging is a particularly
| bad problem. If by "in the longer term" you mean over the
| next hundred million years, I do agree that we'll need to
| solve it. But I don't think it's a particularly difficult
| problem at that timescale. For the next few million
| years, we have plenty of space to just store the stuff
| until recycling it is profitable.
| kijin wrote:
| It is indeed a hard problem. It's also why manufacturers
| are the only ones who can realistically deal with the
| problem. Let the Pringles company collect all the used
| Pringles cans from the same supermarkets they deliver
| Pringles to. They have the scale to justify building a
| dedicated facility for recycling Pringles cans.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Or just don't buy Pringles.
| 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.
| amatecha wrote:
| I really see this as a problem further up the chain - why
| is wasteful packaging even on the shelves? Why is there
| so much crap to throw out? Why was it legal to wrap a
| product in another 25% of its weight in useless, non-
| recyclable packaging? I'm not sure why I as an individual
| am forced to bear the brunt of colossally wasteful
| pipelines and processes that I had no say in. I can do a
| bit and reuse bags, buy stuff with minimal packaging (or
| avoid buying new stuff etc.), but broadly, I have no
| choice most of the time.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 100% agreed, this is exactly the problem. Just take a
| pack of yoghurt, we had good paper packaging and now
| they've glued a useless plastic port to it. Boom, no
| longer recyclable. Same with cheese and other bread
| toppings, all used to be packaged in perfectly recyclable
| paper and now it's sold in see-through plastic.
| adrianN wrote:
| See through plastic can be both recycleable and
| biodegradable and might even use less ressources to
| produce, and improve the shelf life so that less food is
| wasted. Details are very important in these matters,
| which is why it's a bad idea to put the burden of
| figuring this all out on consumers.
| YokoZar wrote:
| Food-soiled paper was never recyclable.
| scrose wrote:
| Maybe OP had meant compostable?
| dnautics wrote:
| Probably shouldn't compost dairy, unless it's
| industrially composted with chemical treatment
| User23 wrote:
| > why is wasteful packaging even on the shelves?
|
| Shrinkage. It's to the point where you need a screwdriver
| to get a kid's toy car out of the box.
| epistasis wrote:
| I've started to give bad reviews to products with
| wasteful packaging that I couldn't see before purchase.
| If there's multiple cubic feet of styrofoam, I will leave
| a bad review mentioning only the packaging complaint so
| that future purchasers will know too.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Consumers are complicit in the scam.
| rland wrote:
| If something isn't obviously recyclable (like, pure
| aluminum, pure glass, or regular paper) I throw it into the
| trash. I'd rather it end up in a landfill here, where there
| is at least a pretense of environmental regulation, than
| have it shipped overseas after being rejected from a
| recycling process.
|
| I also watched that video, it's just so depressing. The
| amount of externalized costs we incur is simply staggering.
|
| When I see someone throw something away, or when I throw
| something away myself, I just think: "Everything you've
| ever thrown away is somewhere."
| gregmac wrote:
| One way could be to tax based on recyclability. There's a
| lot of ways to implement this, but packaging that's 100%
| plain cardboard should be cheaper than something made of
| plastics, and anything where two different materials are
| glued together should just be stupidly expensive. That
| squishy (non-recyclable) foam glued to the inside of
| cardboard boxes is really frustrating.
| m0zg wrote:
| Why wouldn't they be? It's not like lithium goes bad or leaks out
| or anything.
| 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.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Ours is collected locally, you just leave a bag of your
| batteries on top of the bin and it gets collected at the
| same time as the recycling. They will take small
| electrical items as well.
|
| On top of that all supermarkets in the UK have a battery
| return box where you can drop them off.
| 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.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Electronics shouldn't go in the trash either.
| 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.
| The_Beta wrote:
| So why does a battery wear out after an extended number of
| uses?
| sonium wrote:
| It's the "arrangement" of elements in the simplest terms,
| like changes in crystal structure.
| The_Beta wrote:
| So how does recycling revert this back to the original
| structure? Is it just basically melting it?
| esjeon wrote:
| This is about recycled "*NMC111 Cathode*", not recycled whole-
| batteries. Although cathode is expensive, lithium is the tough
| business that requires a new solution.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I just bought a Gen 1 Chevy Volt battery pack segment to use for
| DIY farm tools projects here. 8 years old still has 89% of
| capacity, a convenient form factor, convenient 48V, high current
| (dangerously so!), 2 kWh, and easily purchased from a local
| supplier.
|
| There is a lot of potential for re-use of battery packs, it will
| just take some time for the 3rd party industry to develop around
| it. Lots of use for these things for solar projects, especially.
|
| My point being that actual chemical level recycling is really
| last resort.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| These recycled batteries are just as good as new ones says new
| study written by person who makes and sells them. Is it really a
| study if its by the seller? Isn't it more of a brochure?
| 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.
| starbase wrote:
| Probably depends on the facility. Tesla recycles 100% of used
| batteries it receives, presumably by redeploying good cells as
| stationary storage and recycling the ones that are too far
| gone. At the Nevada plant in 2020, every 1000kWh of unusable
| batteries yielded materials to produce 921kWh of new cells.[0]
|
| With that said, many Teslas that are totaled have their
| batteries sold on the secondary market for classic car EV
| conversions and DIY home energy storage.
|
| [0] https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/2020-tesla-impact-
| report.pdf
| 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.
| mlindner wrote:
| Your initial thoughts are correct but there just aren't enough
| lithium ion battery waste yet to make it very profitable. Once
| more and more EVs start getting end of life it will become very
| profitable. Keep in mind that the cars currently going to
| landfill were made 10 or more years ago. There were very very
| few lithium ion batteries in cars 10+ years ago.
| danans wrote:
| Just as important as recycling these batteries is making it
| possible for older EVs to have their batteries replaced years
| down the road with 3rd party batteries.
|
| In 2031, it should be possible to by a long-past-warranty 2021
| EV, replace the battery pack (with one made from recycled EV
| batteries!), and have it just-work. Just like you can replace the
| engine of a classic car today if you are so inclined.
|
| It should be possible because the electrical connection of the
| batteries to EV drivetrains are relatively simple - although I'm
| sure that will take a lawsuit (like was launched against
| Nespresso to allow 3rd party coffee pods) for EV manufacturers to
| release the specs required for this to happen.
|
| It would be unfortunate if EV batteries were non-serviceable
| except by the manufacturer after they were out of warranty, like
| phones are today. Instead, battery replacement would potentially
| allow the tertiary used EV market to flourish, and make them more
| accessible to people of modest means.
| SECProto wrote:
| > It should be possible because the electrical connection of
| the batteries to EV drivetrains are relatively simple
|
| While this could be true, I certainly wouldn't assume it to be
| so. I dunno how integrated the battery pack is to the system -
| when you press the gas, does the car do things like draw more
| from some cells and less from others based on their degradation
| and capacity? Certainly on the charge side of the system it's
| very integrated, with the charge curve changing as individual
| cells (or at least modules) age/degrade.
| elihu wrote:
| A battery pack on a modern EV is typically just a bunch of
| cells wired together in series, or a bunch of parallel groups
| of cells in series. There isn't anything to cause power to be
| pulled from one group of cells versus another -- if that
| happens, it's a problem because it would cause the cells to
| get out of balance. (You'd typically have a "battery
| management system" whose job is to monitor cell voltages and
| bleed off little power from cells that are reading too high
| to keep everything properly balanced. But that happens very
| slowly, and at low voltages and current.)
|
| As far as the motor controller is concerned, the battery
| might as well just be a single cell. If you change to a
| different kind of battery, you might need to change some of
| the motor controller's parameters (like maximum current
| limit) if those were designed around the limits of the old
| battery.
|
| edit to add: when it comes to the charger and BMS, that stuff
| might or might not have to be replaced depending on the
| extent to which it can be made to work with a different
| configuration. And just like replacing an engine in a modern
| gas-powered car, there's probably a host of sensors that will
| trigger a whole host of warnings if they aren't reconnected
| to equivalent new sensors or spoofed in some way.
| rcxdude wrote:
| The part which deals with all this is the battery management
| system, and it's almost always integrated into the battery
| itself, for reasons of practicality, safety, and seperation
| of concerns. Its interface to the rest of the car and
| charging system is fairly straightforward: mostly it just
| needs to report state of charge and current limits for
| charging and discharging (chargers for these packs are rarely
| anything more than a constant current supply being controlled
| by the BMS). It can in theory provide more detailed
| information but this is just diagnostic, not something the
| user or any other part of the system can really take action
| on (for example there's no way in current EV packs for the
| motor to draw from specific cells more than the others).
|
| Basically the only way for car manufacturers to make this
| interface hard to replicate with third-party packs is by
| introducting some kind of DRM-like signatures on the messages
| from the BMS.
| [deleted]
| adrianN wrote:
| The question is whether the necessary brains are part of the
| pack or part of some other component in the car. But in any
| case, if we require the specs to be open, third parties can
| build compatible batteries.
| bserge wrote:
| Classic car as in pre 1980s or so?
|
| Because an engine change on a modern ICE car is far from easy.
| In major part because of the same bullshit with electronics
| incompatibility caused by manufacturers.
|
| Wrong serial numbers on injectors/ECU/sensors? Welp, fuck you,
| buy compatible original parts or swap _the whole engine_ ,
| every little wire and all.
|
| It's like needing to swap the battery+controller+motors on an
| EV.
|
| Then again, government regulations play a part here, at least
| in Europe. Can't just have you riding around in your now
| "custom" car.
| waiseristy wrote:
| Unfortunately some OEM's have decided that structural batteries
| are the way of the future. Real difficult replace something
| that's a integral structural member of the car
| SECProto wrote:
| > Real difficult replace something that's a integral
| structural member of the car
|
| If you look at some recent photos [1] of the Tesla Berlin
| tour, the "structural battery pack" is still a bolt-in part
| of the car - it just carries some of the loads and has the
| seats bolted to it. If it's a standardized design, eg used
| for multiple model years, it should be a fairly standard
| replacement part in another decade or so. And the more
| efficient structural will reduce steel consumption by
| thousands of tonnes per year and reduce curb weight and
| increase mileage. Win-win-win for the environment.
|
| I'm an optimist.
|
| [1] https://electrek.co/2021/10/10/tesla-unveils-new-
| structural-...
| waiseristy wrote:
| Nice link, looks like they still might have enough meat on
| the chassis to not require weird temporary structural
| bracing when unbolting the pack. It's almost like a body-
| on-pack, like the body-on-frame of old.
| panick21_ wrote:
| There has been this myth around that 'structural' means 'non
| replaceable'. This is complete nonsense made up by ignorant
| people who dislike Tesla.
|
| Structural packs are nothing new, even cars like the iPace
| have structural packs and so do many. Hell even the Model S
| was structural and that had a swapable battery. Tesla or BYD
| structural packs are no different.
|
| The actual innovation when people talk about 'structural
| packs' nowdays is that the cell themselves are part of the
| structure. However, this has nothing to do with how the pack
| is connected to the car.
|
| Sadly the discussion on these topic gets totally confused by
| people endlessly repeating the same myths without
| understanding what they are talking about.
|
| Just don't get into a car crash without the pack inside.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| Gogoro is a taiwanese company that makes scooters where the
| battery is a power pack that you can just replace in a few
| seconds[1].
|
| They're apparently expanding into more countries. I really like
| the concept of these things. It should be possible to make
| drivein charging stations for cars that do the same. But
| obviously you wouldn't be able to do that manually and
| designing such a system is a lot more expensive.
|
| [1] https://www.gogoro.com/gogoro-network/
| mdrzn wrote:
| Such a smart solution, I hope they go global with it!
|
| I've been thinking of a similar solution for e-bikes and
| electric scooters (like Bird and Lime for example). Swapping
| a battery would be SO MUCH BETTER than having to fully
| recharge your own battery.
|
| If I had to make a prediction for 50 years in the future, I'd
| guess that Tesla and others would study a way to hot-swap
| batteries in the car at the "e-Station" in a couple minutes
| instead of waiting for your own battery to recharge.
| nmridul wrote:
| India will start allowing sale of EVs without batteries so user
| can purchase/ lease batteries including third party
| batteries...
|
| "This will make the upfront cost of the electrical 2 wheeler
| (2W) and 3 wheelers (3W) to be lower than ICE 2 "
|
| https://www.livemint.com/auto-news/indian-govt-to-allow-regi...
| hkai wrote:
| Looking at my phone and macbook with built-in batteries, I
| realize a car with a swappable battery is not something we can
| achieve as humanity.
| asimovfan wrote:
| It depends on 1 ("one") legislation. Its not like theres
| inherently anything stopping this from happening except the
| insatiable hunger of some rich dudes. I believe the EU is
| forcing the iphones to have usb-c?
| tchvil wrote:
| It was tried and failed:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company)
|
| That doesn't mean it wouldn't work today, but probably a
| harder problem than it looks.
| tim333 wrote:
| I've swapped batteries in iphone and macbooks several times.
| Just because the manufacturer doesn't really want you to do
| it doesn't mean you can't do it.
| richardw wrote:
| A few Chinese companies are doing it. Eg:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-
| transportation/chinas...
| dragonelite wrote:
| Nio is also doing it, not sure if they have created a
| standard bodies for it.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Here's Nio battery swap in action
| https://youtu.be/hTsrDpsYHrw?t=407
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The thing about phones and laptops is that they have the
| excuse that miniaturization makes this necessary (it's still
| an excuse but it's better cover). And current systems
| essentially have the lifetime of the battery.
|
| Cars should be a different story but we'll have to fight for
| that even.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| And ingress protection, which requires excellent seals,
| which need a bit of know-how (i.e., a shop) to correctly
| reapply. At least that's what I like to tell myself.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Which laptops actually do that? Besides the fanless
| macbook air, overwhelming majority of laptops ingest and
| push out air.
| bestouff wrote:
| Cars too need miniaturisation and sealing. To an extent.
| richardw wrote:
| 2025: "But the chassis is the battery! Absolutely needs
| to be disposable"
| hoseja wrote:
| Cars use the battery as a structural component.
| [deleted]
| dotancohen wrote:
| Not at all. The batteries are often mounted _inside_
| structural components, but they themselves are not load
| bearing.
| hoseja wrote:
| https://electrek.co/2021/10/10/tesla-unveils-new-
| structural-...
| dotancohen wrote:
| That is a battery pack, not a battery.
|
| Battery packs are structural components for safety
| reasons more than anything. Weight and volume savings are
| secondary to safety in regards to anything with high
| energy density, be it a battery pack, fuel cell, or gas
| tank.
|
| But though they _contain_ batteries, a battery pack is
| not a battery any more than a car is an engine. The
| battery inside the battery pack remains non-structural
| and non-load-bearing.
| [deleted]
| hoseja wrote:
| >with the battery cells helping to solidify the platform
| as one big unit
|
| The individual cylinders are made from steel. The steel
| is used structurally. Perhaps next you'll tell me the
| "battery" is actually just the anode, cathode and
| electrolyte?
| dotancohen wrote:
| You're right! My brief skim of the article overlooked
| that very important detail.
|
| Thank you.
|
| > Perhaps next you'll tell me the "battery" is actually
| just the anode, cathode and electrolyte?
|
| No, next I'll tell you that this isn't Reddit and you
| don't have to be a dick to "win an argument on the
| internet". On HN you can simply point out the facts, like
| you did above.
| pedrocr wrote:
| As far as I can tell so far no one has used the
| individual cell cylinders as load bearing components,
| only the battery box. Tesla's "structural battery" is
| aiming to do that and have the individual cell cylinders
| carry loads.
| [deleted]
| elihu wrote:
| Interfacing with the existing car's electronics gets into
| "right to repair" technology, with some manufacturers being
| more open than others.
|
| Unfortunately battery packs are very vehicle-specific.
| Hopefully we'll eventually see some standardized form factors
| so you can just install a generic battery. Until then, 3rd
| parties will have to make a different battery pack for each
| model they want to support. Most of the problem is just the
| physical dimensions and shape of the pack, but also there are a
| bunch of electrical connections, battery-management system
| (BMS) integration, coolant hoses, and so on that would vary
| from one vehicle to the next.
|
| Hopefully as the technology matures, batteries get physically
| smaller and lighter, and therefore easier to shoehorn into
| weird spaces.
| coryrc wrote:
| You can put a battery from a crashed 2021 Leaf in a 2015 Leaf.
|
| There's little the non-Tesla automakers are doing to stop you.
| They aren't helping you, but they aren't stopping you. The
| biggest problem is there's basically no market for it right
| now. I used to build stuff for this market (more-or-less). Only
| a tiny fraction of vehicles need anything. It's far cheaper to
| sell your vehicle to someone who doesn't mind 70 miles range
| and buy a new one with all the scale advantages of mass
| manufacturing than paying for the shop labor ($100-300/hr) and
| amortized cost of a battery few people want.
| mnsc wrote:
| This makes me more pessimistic that "the markets" will ever
| fix something related to anything where the negative effects
| are seen a decade down the road. We will switch to an
| electric fleet to "save the environment" and in 20 years we
| will throw our collective hands up in the air and see that
| "yup, that didn't work".
| coryrc wrote:
| What do you think is going to happen in 20 years?
|
| Approaching ten years of life, most of these cars have lost
| <10% battery life (and loss is fairly linear in lithium) so
| in 20 more years we'll have cars with 70% of their original
| battery life. They'll still be perfectly usable for many
| people. So long as fossil-fueled vehicles are in use, let's
| get more EVs on the road instead of upgrading the ones we
| have.
| Lorkki wrote:
| > to "save the environment"
|
| This is an odd straw man to bring out, when the goal is
| very explicitly to reduce carbon output. Also nothing so
| far implies that the legislation is impossible to fix once
| the electric fleet exists.
| Joeri wrote:
| Economic activity nearly always has negative externalities.
| Our economic model is based on ever growing economic
| activity, and coupled with population growth this produces
| ever mounting externalities. We treat these externalities
| separately, as individual problems to solve, first clean
| air, then clean water, then fixing the ozone hole, now
| fighting global warming. Every time that we "solve" these
| problems we cause new externalities to pop up. Even if we
| "solve" climate change, something else will pop up. Perhaps
| the impact of chemicals on biological reproduction? That is
| building up steam and would be even bigger to tackle than
| climate change.
|
| The classic environmentalist solution is to live a smaller
| life, with fewer things. That is a hard sell and runs
| counter to innate human instinct to gather resources. On
| the other hand, economic policy can't seem to move past
| fighting symptoms, and does its very best to pretend the
| growth model isn't the root cause of all environmental
| problems. Does anyone have a handle on a real and pragmatic
| solution I wonder?
| ducleonctor wrote:
| History shows that individuals and groups equipped with
| the mindset of accumulating wealth and power will not
| yield their "progress".
|
| This means society may tend to fall back to authoritarian
| systems like feudalism, when put under increasing
| external pressure.
|
| The struggles and lack of coordination caused by this
| failure to act as a collective with modern technology
| present will lead to a fast and indiscriminate decline of
| the worlds population, I think.
| mnsc wrote:
| Thank you for being tuned into my pessimism and helping
| me paint an even bleaker picture! =D No but seriously
| that was a very thought-provoking reply and I'm
| personally very aligned with the classic environmentalist
| solution but equally desoriented on how that could be
| "sold" on a global scale as a way of living. My political
| leanings is showing here so it comes as no surprise that
| my analysis is that the issue is with that sneaky quoted
| word. "Selling" an idea implies rational actors that
| could "buy in" to the "small life lifestyle" and reject
| the options readily available on the market, which would
| be a (potential) life abundant with short term kicks and
| a dopamine filled days with an endless supply of various
| things that are fun and "help" us in our daily life (but
| in the end will destroy earth). Which indeed is a hard
| sell, primarily because we aren't rational economical
| agents that can weight "guaranteed happiness the next
| decade" vs "my children potentially living in a desert
| fighting for scrap in 50 years".
| bulletsvshumans wrote:
| What about an authority that could price negative
| externalities into the goods as they were discovered? I
| think there are extremely high challenges around
| enforcing this globally, and resisting the pressure from
| industries that are impacted, but it would seem to be the
| least disruptive in terms of modifying the fundamentals
| of our existing capitalist system.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Third party repairers are already popping up that will do this
| for old Nissan Leafs.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4nS_tSQiVQ
|
| There is quite a big commercial opportunity, I expect the
| sector will grow alongside the growth and ageing of EV's.
| csours wrote:
| Just got to make sure the DRM server is up.
| fy20 wrote:
| > Just like you can replace the engine of a classic car today
| if you are so inclined
|
| How this works is usually you would replace/fix individual
| parts of the engine until it works again. When you buy one
| ready to swap in, it's because a third party has taken the time
| to fix up an old engine - usually with no help from the
| original manufacturer.
|
| A lot of car parts you cannot buy new replacements for. Engine
| parts you usually can, as pretty much everything there is
| consumable, but I mean things like body panels or interior
| parts. However a lot of cars end up damaged beyond repair,
| which means there are usually enough parts in the surrogate
| market so old cars can be kept running.
|
| In this case it's not reasonable to ask manufacturers to be
| selling new battery packs 10 years after discontinuing that
| model, but they should make sure it's possible for third
| parties to make/remake them and have them behave the same as an
| OEM battery pack.
| kazinator wrote:
| What a headline, yikes! How about:
|
| Recycled Material Lithium Batteries Just As Good
| earleybird wrote:
| I need to find that battery mine . . . sorry, leaving now :-)
| godmode2019 wrote:
| I have a question if someone can help with
|
| We talk about recycling, I'm concerned that it's the same chatter
| as we had from the plastic companies in the 80-90s who invented
| the reduce reuse recycle slogan so that they could get away with
| selling more plastic, when its much cheaper to produce new
| plastic than recycle.
|
| So the question is, is it cheaper to produced new batteries or
| recycle old ones?
|
| I feel lithium is a transition material, until we have more
| sustainable battery tech.
| 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
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Everything can be recycled with sufficient low cost energy. If we
| had 100x the available energy at 1/100 the cost, things that seem
| crazy become possible. E.g. deconstruction of an iPhone into
| piles of constituent elements.
| 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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