Recycling company Redwood Materials is doing its best to turn battery manufacturing into a circular industry by recycling battery cathode materials, MotorTrend reported.
Batteries — especially rechargeable lithium batteries — are key to a future powered by electricity instead of heavily polluting dirty energy. However, if our current battery technology has one weakness, it's that every unit requires rare metals such as lithium, nickel, and cobalt.
Mining for those metals damages the environment — not as much as dirty energy, but it's still significant. And as MotorTrend pointed out, much of the world's supply comes from high-conflict parts of the globe and can contribute to hostilities.
So what's an obvious way to cut down on the need for new battery materials? Recycling old batteries.
That's easier said than done, however. Batteries are complex structures full of hazardous materials, and there are hundreds of different kinds, so taking them apart is tricky to automate. Only certain parts of the battery are useful to recycle.
Many existing recycling companies focus on creating "black mass," MotorTrend reported — a metal-rich substance that can be further refined to extract the useful elements.
But Redwood Materials goes further, manually disassembling batteries and refining the components to produce "cathode active materials," materials that are ready to make new battery cathodes.
Redwood Materials' products include 100% recycled lithium, 30% recycled nickel, and 30% recycled cobalt. It has deals with Panasonic and Toyota to provide these materials from its upcoming Cathode Active Material building at its Nevada facility.
This building is set to produce 20 gigawatt-hours worth of cathode materials per year, and there are future plans to build four more, bringing the facility's capacity to 100 gigawatt-hours worth of cathode materials annually. As MotorTrend revealed, that's enough for 1.3 million electric vehicles.
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That will be a huge help to America's EV industry, which makes it a huge help to the environment, both by replacing gas-burning vehicles and reducing the need for mining.
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