The thing these articles miss is that there is a better otion than recycling these.
A Tesla battery at 10 yeas is down to about 70% capacity and the car owner will want to replace it.
But a battery at 70% capacity has many other uses. Pile these the cheap used batteries of 1000 Teslas outside a nuclear power plant. All of a sudden the plant is much more responsive to peaks and throughs of electricity demand.
Lefties don’t think that way. Lithium=young/sexy. That’s how they think. Just like Bill Clinton. Do you think he thanks Hillary for getting him where he is? He’s like coal and ivermectin. On to the next thing and don’t worry what anyone thinks.
Musk’s former consigliere JB Straubel is working on recycling at a new outfit called Redwood Materials in Nevada.
Haven’t heard much detail.
Totally worth it.
Most of the cells are nickel in current battery electric vehicles in the USA.
In the near future most standard non-performance cars will be mostly lead and easier to recycle. Further into the future maybe sodium-ion batteries.
This article doesn’t discuss the work of leading edge companies in this space like Redwood Materials.
Gasoline/Diesel vehicles is the lifeblood of Russian and Muslim armies/terrorist.
Oil is a global fungible product where price is based on global demand and supply not local demand and supply.
The purchase of a gallon of gasoline anywhere in the world supports the price of a barrel of oil everywhere in the world.
Pretty amazing read:
This is an excellent breakdown.
Batteries, they do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid.
Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, do you see?”
Einstein’s formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.
There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.
Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.
All batteries are self-discharging. That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery’s metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.
In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.
But that is not half of it. For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive production costs.
A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.
It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just - one - battery.”
Sixty-eight percent of the world’s cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?”
I’d like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being ‘green,’ but it is not. This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.
The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.
Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades.
There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions.
“Going Green” may sound like the Utopian ideal but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth’s environment than meets the eye, for sure.
Obviously copied/pasted. I encourage you to pass it along too.
Talk about irony, our recycling service has been down 6 months because someone threw a L Ion battery in with their recycling stuff and burned the whole plant down.
EV battery = Toxic and weights 900lbs
Been saying right along. That EV’s are chemical polluters. At least nature can deal with carbon emissions rather quickly.
I would like to hear someone’s opinion about hydrogen powered cars as well as their efficiency. At the same time what would be the cheapest way to produce hydrogen. When using hydrogen what would be more efficient, using a piston type engine to burn it or using a fuel cell for converting hydrogen to electricity first and then using it to feed electric motors. No doubt that some members of FR are smart enough to come up with a reasonable answer.
Consider how much of the “recycling” we dutifully separate from our trash actually gets recycled. Aluminum and steel cans most maybe. Glass and paper some maybe. Plastics not so much. Imagine literally millions of EV batteries containing a toxic soup of chemicals…I have my doubts few if any will get recycled. Lithium ion batteries also have a tendency to catch fire. Imagine thousands of Li-ion batteries stockpiled awaiting recycling … a disaster waiting to happen
“Six years ago, Ryan Melsert was part of a small team of engineers sitting in a construction trailer in the middle of the desert in Nevada plotting the details of Tesla’s new battery production facility, the Gigafactory. “We were told to essentially design and build the largest factory in the world, to make the lowest-cost batteries in the world, and to do so without consuming any energy,” he says. “It was a really ambitious goal. And we were literally just staring at a patch of dirt.”
“As the factory’s first production lines started to come online, making powders and slurries and battery cells and packs, Melsert recognized a challenge for the industry. The Gigafactory did what it set out to do. But making batteries generates waste, like trimmings and defective batteries, and it was hard to find any facilities to recycle that waste, or even just process it so that it would no longer be hazardous.
“We started buying tractor trailers and parking them onsite, and filling these tractor trailers with all different types of waste material, just hoping that at some point somebody would find a way to be able to process it and recycle it and do it in a sustainable and cost-efficient manner,” he says. “But over those first few years, there weren’t many companies who came forward and were able to do it.”
“The same challenge exists for used batteries that come from electric cars and from consumer electronics, from smartphones to laptops. The amount of lithium-ion battery waste is quickly growing. But traditional recyclers aren’t equipped to handle it well. It can be dangerous: This summer, for example, a fire broke out at a warehouse storing an estimated 100 tons of lithium-ion batteries, burning for nearly a week and forcing thousands of people to evacuate the area.
Even when batteries don’t burn, the recycling process can release plumes of toxic pollution. And the traditional process is inefficient, so it creates a lot of waste. It’s also so expensive that recyclers often have to be paid to do the work, rather than being able to buy the waste themselves and profit. Moving around huge EV batteries, which weigh hundreds of pounds, can cost more than the value of the materials recovered in traditional recycling. Melsert decided to leave Tesla and start American Battery Technology Company (ABTC) to work on the problem......more at link
https://www.fastcompany.com/90693082/why-this-former-tesla-engineer-now-works-on-battery-recycling
Read later.