At the end of June last year, a fire broke out in an abandoned paper mill in the small town of Morris, about 60 miles south of Chicago. Firefighters who rushed to the scene found that the warehouse of the factory contained about 100 tons of lithium-ion batteries, as well as "a large number of lead-acid batteries, nickel-cadmium batteries, solar panels and other discarded electronic products." Environmental Protection Agency.
Residents within half a mile were evacuated to avoid toxic fumes. It took nearly a week to put out the fire. The US Environmental Protection Agency pointed out in its post-fire action memo that firefighters did not use water or foam because these materials "will accelerate battery fires and cause environmental damage." They eventually buried the smoldering ruins using Portland cement.
Jin Zheng, president of Superior Battery Company, told local reporters the day after the fire that he planned to use the warehouse to charge the new batteries before sending them to customers. However, the Environmental Protection Agency listed in its memo that there were at least 25 tons of "damaged, defective or recalled lithium batteries" and "a large number of e-waste trays."
Batteries are the key to the upcoming shift to electric vehicle production and wider renewable energy sources. Most major automakers (except Toyota, which has a large share in hybrid vehicles) have felt the consumer support for the electrification of vehicles, and have now embraced electric vehicle manufacturing, which may trigger a revolution in the transportation industry, accounting for 29% U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2019. General Motors, Honda, Volvo, and Audi have announced their goal of halting the production of gasoline-powered vehicles by the mid-2030s. Ford recently announced a $11.4 billion electric vehicle assembly and battery manufacturing plant in Tennessee and Kentucky, which is expected to employ 11,000 workers. BloombergNEF, a London-based consulting firm, predicts that in 15 years, half of all new cars and trucks will be electric vehicles. Taking into account the current state of battery technology, each battery will carry a battery containing at least 150 pounds of lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese.
In order to meet these forecasts, the production of key metals in rechargeable batteries is expected to soar five to ten times in the next ten years. This presents a series of disturbing environmental, social and political challenges for automakers and other end users of these materials. The domestic battery recycling industry can meet these challenges to a large extent, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs nationwide in the process. But if this country is to realize this potential, it needs to be more radical than any policy agenda put forward so far.
Mining lithium requires a lot of energy and water. Depending on the extraction method used, it will leave behind mountains of gravel or huge saltwater pits. Although underground reserves seem to be sufficient, the new supply of key raw materials extracted from lithium-ion batteries has raised concerns about replacing one kind of environmental damage in another form. A new lithium mine in Nevada was approved during the decline of the Trump administration. It has been opposed by local environmentalists, ranchers, and Fort McDermite and the Shoshone tribe. They said that before the Ministry of Interior decided to release The license was not fully negotiated with them.
At the same time, more than 70% of the world's cobalt (the most expensive metal in batteries) comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has half of the world's reserves. According to human rights activists, 15% to 30% of the cobalt industry in the Democratic Republic of the Congo consists of small-scale mining operations that often ignore mine safety and child labor standards. Bloody turf battles often erupt between artisanal miners and the security guards of the large mining companies that dominate the industry.
Above these concerns is the race to control this strategic industry. The voices within Biden's administration point to the Chinese government's massive subsidies for its electric vehicle industry. Like the echoes of the US-Japan trade war in the 1980s, they worry that the world's second largest economy has taken the lead in developing technologies that will promote the long-term competitiveness of the US economy and ultimately affect national security. A new "National Lithium Battery Blueprint, 2021-2030" was released in June last year. "The commercial and defense markets... are different in terms of end use and requirements, [but] the requirements for innovation and R&D are similar. "," said. "Successful domestic production and reliable supply chains in these two markets will be essential."
American conservatives have also begun to accept the idea of nationalist industrial policy. A new report from the Hudson Institute warns that China now directly or indirectly controls more than 70% of the world's lithium supply. Its company refines 59% of the world's lithium and produces 61% of the world's metal heavy cathodes, which are used in finished batteries.
The United States does not need to adopt a neo-imperialist and arbitrary approach to China’s electric vehicle technology or lithium supply chain to justify the promotion of the domestic lithium-ion battery and electronic waste recycling industry. However, by making the battery industry more localized and sustainable, recycling will ultimately help solve the problems on both sides.
Compared with today's output, the expected output of electric vehicles in the next ten years will inevitably require additional mining. But within 10 or 15 years, recycling advocates say that electric cars sold now will be thrown into the waste dump. Their batteries will provide recyclable resources that can be used in next-generation cars, which will greatly reduce America’s dependence on newly mined metals. In addition, if solid-state and other technologies developed in government-funded laboratories prove to be successful, the next generation will require far fewer rare earth metals than currently produced car batteries, and will significantly expand the range of electric vehicles. .
Senator Tom Caper of Delaware said at a recent forum sponsored by Li-Cycle, Ontario: “The idea of a circular economy, we use things over and over again and restrict what gets into landfills, which is very important for us. Energy independence is essential." Recyclers. "It contributes to the promise of our greenhouse gas emission targets...it deserves bipartisan support." The infrastructure bill passed by the Senate last summer included $6 billion to promote battery recycling and research and development in this area.
In recent years, more than a dozen companies have entered the field of e-waste recycling, some of which are funded by diversified fossil fuel suppliers, ironically. At the end of last month, Li-Cycle attracted a US$100 million investment from a subsidiary of Koch Investments Group. The company plans to break ground in Rochester, New York this winter to build a $175 million factory that will use recycled batteries to make metal that can be used by manufacturers.
The Nevada Redwood Materials Company, founded by Tesla co-founder Jeffrey Straubel two years ago, recently opened a recycling plant in Carson City and plans to raise $1 billion to invest in a nearby 1 million square feet of cathode manufacturing plant, the plant will use its recovered lithium, cobalt and other metals. "It is both inspiring and frightening to see so many countries and car companies announce their switch to electric vehicles," he told Bloomberg News. "But there is a huge gap in what needs to happen."
The financiers behind these companies foresee the day when recycling will provide a large part of the materials needed for new batteries. The same is true for manufacturers. GM senior manager Pablo Valencia (Pablo Valencia) said: "We are focused on how to align the recycling business with the battery business so that it can flow directly into the battery." "This is an opportunity, not a you. Questions that must be pushed to others. This is a game changer."
However, as the Morris fire revealed, obtaining waste batteries and safely extracting their constituent metals poses a series of new challenges for emerging industries and policy makers.
Lithium-ion batteries were first commercialized in the early 1990s and are now ubiquitous in computers, mobile phones, cameras, and other electronic devices. Globally, only about half of the batteries are currently recycled. The rest are thrown away or dormant in products that are no longer in use (for example, old computers and mobile phones accumulate dust in people's homes).
Currently, most battery recycling takes place in China and Europe, where regulations are much stricter than those in the United States. The Department of Energy estimates that only 5% of discarded lithium-ion batteries in the United States are recycled. A spokesperson for the organization said that Call2Recycle is a non-profit alliance that promotes battery recycling. According to statistics, by 2020, the number of recycled batteries will be just over 1,000 metric tons, accounting for only 12% to 12% of the rechargeable batteries available for recycling. 15%.
Analysts predict that the number of old batteries that can be recycled will increase exponentially in the next ten years, and will quadruple by 2025 to 700,000 tons, and by 2040, as car battery recycling is fully put into use, it will reach 9 million Ton. Given that the United States is the world's largest economy, consumer-oriented, and loves cars and gadgets, there is no doubt that it will remain the world's largest repository of recyclable waste.
This provides huge opportunities for start-up recycling companies in the United States. But they also face two huge problems: how to dispose of waste and how to dispose of waste cleanly and safely.
Most recyclers currently rely on end-use manufacturers to dispose of waste. For example, more than half of Li-Cycle's waste comes from lithium-ion battery manufacturers in the automotive and electronics industries. CEO Ajay Kochhar said that this proportion will increase to 70% by 2025. It has signed a scrap supply agreement with General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, LG and Ultium Cells, the latter taking over General Motors’ former battery manufacturing plant in Lordstown, Ohio.
Materials lost during the manufacturing process (Kochhar compares it with wood scraps from furniture factories) are sent to its two rendering facilities in Kingston and Rochester, Ontario (the other two are in Alabama and Arizona) State is under construction). Then, the processing plant uses a water-based system to distill the "black matter" of recyclable metals from the crushed waste. Under Li-Cycle's hub-and-spoke system, the intermediate will be sent to the planned Rochester plant to be processed into the purified metal needed to make new batteries.
On the other hand, Redwood Materials and other start-ups in the waste reprocessing industry use incinerators to melt the waste and then separate it into black substances and waste plastics and other materials. Kochhar claims that Li-Cycle's technology is better and it is easier to get community support because it does not produce toxic gas emissions. "Some people don't want this in their backyard," he told me. "We don't discharge waste water; we don't have any heat."
Safety in the waste collection process is another matter. A report issued by the EPA in July recorded 245 fires caused by improperly handled waste lithium iron batteries in 64 waste recycling centers in 28 states between 2013 and 2020. "There are many lessons to be learned from the Morris fire," Kochhar said. "The local town and fire chief must know what we are storing, what the risks are, and what the emergency plan is."
This means that regulations need to be updated and strictly enforced: Superior Battery didn't even bother to obtain licenses for its storage facilities.
Kochhar said that the quantitative case of promoting recycling through national policies is overwhelming: recycling one ton of batteries can reduce 5 tons of carbon dioxide emissions and 96 tons of mining-related water.
The starting method is to accelerate the pace of consumer electronics recycling, which can be initiated by expanding state and local requirements, which will put pressure on federal regulations. According to data from the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Forum, more than half of the waste electronic products in Europe have been recycled. The forum is made up of 36 non-profit organizations from 25 countries, including manufacturers that support comprehensive recycling programs.
Under pressure from the WEEE Forum and other environmental organizations, the European Union is considering updating its regulations this month to mandate more recycling. It hopes to recycle 65% of lithium-ion batteries by 2025 and 70% by 2030. At least 95% of cobalt and 70% of lithium in these batteries are recovered in recycling facilities.
On the other hand, the United States does not have federal regulations, nor does it propose any regulations. About half of the states have enacted laws to encourage e-waste recycling, but only two states include mandatory requirements. New York requires battery manufacturers to recycle and recycle used batteries for free. California requires that any retailer selling rechargeable batteries should establish a system to collect used batteries for reuse and recycling, and consumers do not have to pay any fees.
But this leaves most parts of the country without any systematic method to collect or dispose of old electronic devices that carry recyclable lithium-ion batteries. "Most used batteries are in the drawers of people's mobile phone history collection," said Jeffrey Spangenberger, director of the ReCell Center, a recycling project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and headquartered in Argonne, a suburb of Chicago. laboratory. "Or people throw them into the recycling bin. The local recycling facility can't handle it, and the fire breaks out."
The goal of ReCell is to simplify the recycling process and reduce costs. Its current focus is to develop technology to refurbish the cathodes in individual cells in lithium-ion batteries so that they can be reused in new batteries, which will reduce the recycling process by half. As far as the current situation is concerned, most of the recovered black substances are shipped abroad, because three-quarters of all primary battery production occurs in China.
"Without cathode manufacturing capacity, recycling will not do us much benefit," Spangenberger said. "We can recycle the raw materials used to make new batteries, but it still needs to travel around the world to get back to us, because manufacturing and recycling go hand in hand."
The 100-day review issued by the Biden administration in June last year called for increased public investment in next-generation batteries to reduce the use of rare materials, advance solid-state designs, and recycle materials from “waste” lithium-ion batteries. Although the Senate passed a five-year infrastructure bill worth $1.20, it allocated $6 billion for battery manufacturing and material mining and processing projects, including only $200 million for research and development and demonstration projects for electric vehicle battery recycling. It also established a $10 million fund for the Lithium-ion Battery Recycling Award sponsored by the US Department of Energy.
Sadly, the larger Build Back Better plan did not mention battery recycling. Given that it may sacrifice some or all of its $150 billion expenditure on climate-related projects to win the votes of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the United States faces a serious risk of becoming this emerging industry. This will be a huge loss, and not just for the millions of Americans who depend on the auto industry for their livelihoods and need these jobs because they are facing displacement due to the switch to all-electric vehicles. As we transition to a low-carbon economy, this will damage the overall competitiveness of the United States. This will also be devastating to the environment, because it will make the United States overly dependent on the new mining industry. This will intensify the land rights and land use disputes that have already formed in these mines. The lack of a strong regulatory structure may also reduce the safety of any recycling program. No part of the U.S. decarbonization effort will benefit from a better battery recycling program—if we fail to establish it, then no effort will be compromised.
Merrill Goozner is a journalist who has been engaged in business, economics and healthcare for a long time. He wrote the GoozNews newsletter.