Electric vehicle sales are racing ahead, but is there a plan for the waste they create? | 24CA News
There’s a brand new enterprise going down in a big, nondescript warehouse in Kingston, Ont.: Lithium-ion battery recycling. And it may very well be an necessary part of Canada’s net-zero future.
The facility, owned by Canadian startup Li-Cycle, homes stacks of depleted lithium-ion batteries that not way back would have been destined for a landfill. The firm is giving them new life — recycling the batteries that energy most electrical automobiles, telephones and laptops.
“It’s kind of like urban mining,” mentioned Li-Cycle CEO Ajay Kochar. “Basically, we can ensure that whatever we get out of the ground and put into batteries, we get as much of it back.”
Auto analysis agency J.D. Power estimates electrical automobile batteries have a lifespan of ten to twenty years — so electrical automobiles have now been round lengthy sufficient in Canada that some batteries will must be changed close to the top of the last decade.
Finding methods to recycle their expensive, poisonous batteries may deal with the environmental questions that come up from constructing electrical automobiles within the first place.
In Canada, EVs have now been round lengthy sufficient that some will must be changed within the subsequent few years, prompting some companies to search out methods to recycle all of the batteries that energy them and switch them into worthwhile supplies.
Retrieving ‘black mass’
Li-Cycle shreds the spent batteries and separates the supplies via a water-based approach often called hydrometallurgical processing.
It sifts out metals and plastics for recycling, leaving the primary byproduct — a dirt-like substance often called black mass. Black mass is made up of lithium, cobalt and nickel; essential minerals which can be the constructing blocks of EV batteries.
Starting in 2023, Li-Cycle will ship the black mass to a brand new facility it’s constructing in Rochester, N.Y., the place it could possibly separate the black mass into worthwhile battery-grade supplies for use to make new EV batteries. Li-Cycle says the plant would be the first supply of recycled battery-grade lithium carbonate manufacturing in North America.
Kochar mentioned his firm can get well 95 per cent of these essential minerals wanted to make new EV batteries, and the method can occur repeatedly.
“There’s no limit on the number of times the same lithium, nickel and cobalt can be recycled,” he mentioned.
The position essential minerals play
The position essential minerals play in making EV batteries has come beneath a microscope lately. They are mined in only a few international locations and demand has soared amid a good provide, inflicting costs to spike.
Canada and the U.S. have every plowed forward with plans this yr to safe home provide chains of essential minerals to increase the extraction in addition to recycling of fabric like lithium.
In early December, Ottawa unveiled a technique that might enable for quicker approvals on essential minerals initiatives.
At the time, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson mentioned that with out essential minerals, “there is no green energy transition.”
Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson unveiled the Liberal authorities’s new essential minerals technique, together with plans to quicker excavate supplies for clear power expertise.
According to a 2020 report by the International Council on Clean Transportation, recycling outdated EV batteries may scale back the necessity for brand new mining by 20 per cent by 2040.
“We do need the material in the first place, so that needs to happen as cleanly as possible,” mentioned Kochar. “But once we have the [critical minerals], we have to keep it in a circular loop and not have to go back and have more impact in terms of mining.”
Battery waste a worldwide problem
Li-Cycle is not the one battery recycler within the nation. Other Canadian gamers embrace Lithion Recycling and Retriev Technologies, and so they’re all ramping up as Canada strikes to mandate EV gross sales.
The federal authorities is proposing laws that might require 20 per cent of all passenger automobiles offered within the nation to be electrical beginning in 2026, and shifting as much as 60 per cent of all gross sales by 2030.
Josipa Petrunic, president and CEO of the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium, says waste from depleted lithium-ion batteries is an issue proper now, and already piling up globally.
“The reality is that battery waste is pretty much my generation’s nuclear waste problem,” she mentioned. “So we’re going to have to figure it out, whether we like it or not.”
“We have to go faster. It cannot take us 12 to 15 years to permit new mines in this country if we want to successfully advance the energy transition,” mentioned Natural Resource Minister Jonathan Wilkinson because the federal authorities launched its essential minerals technique Friday.
Incentives should hook up with recycling packages
While Canada hasn’t pledged federal funding for recycling EV batteries, the U.S. is spending tons of of thousands and thousands of {dollars} on recycling initiatives. The U.S. Senate additionally simply handed a invoice to extend EV battery recycling, which may quickly be signed into regulation.
Petrunic says Ottawa must enact insurance policies that join incentives for EV purchases and manufacturing to recycling.
“The government can catch up on recycling really fast by tying all of that money, billions of dollars, to recycling plans, so that cities and consumers can’t buy cars or buses that don’t have a recycling plan attached to them.”
Paul Rapoport was an early EV adopter, and acquired his Tesla Model S in 2014 as a technique to scale back automobile emissions.
Back then, there was little details about EV battery recycling. He thinks recycling choices will drive extra shoppers to EVs as a result of they will really feel higher about the place the batteries will find yourself.
“It’s very important to know that these batteries are not going to end up in a landfill forever and ever.”
