General Motors has just made a really big bet on the future of cleaner EV battery technology. The giant car manufacturer helped raise $44 million to fund a Massachusetts-based startup called Nanoramic, which has hit on a clever way to solve a major PFAS problem that plagues EV battery production.
Normally, when manufacturing an EV battery, a substance called PVDF (Polyvinylidene Fluoride) is used as a binder to keep the various components of the battery's internals together during production. PVDF is a forever chemical, similar to PFAS, according to CleanTechnica.
But it gets worse.
Once it's finished its duty as a binder, PVDF is dissolved away by a toxic chemical called NMP (n-methylpyrrolidone). According to the Environmental Protection Agency, NMP can cause a host of serious health effects, including fertility problems and a threat to the survival of a fetus, among other issues.
Nanoramic may have a solution to both PVDFs and NMP in battery production.
The company's solution is a proprietary binder called Neocarbonix that's based on a carbon structure and contains no forever chemicals. As an added bonus, Neocarbonix doesn't need the toxic solvent NMP to break down during manufacturing. Instead, just water and alcohol act as solvents.
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This is a tremendous one-two punch for both environmental and worker safety.
"Neocarbonix® is fundamentally a force multiplier – it is designed to replace conventional binders in battery electrodes and targets far-reaching improvements in battery cost, energy density, power, fast charging, worker safety, manufacturing energy consumption, and supply chain security," Nanoramic said in a press release.
Mining the materials required for EV batteries is problematic (though far better long-term for climate health than burning dirty fuels), but removing forever chemicals and toxic solvents from the process goes a long way toward making the entire battery production process far more sustainable and efficient.
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Clearly, big companies like GM see a future in clean battery technology. Let's hope that future comes sooner rather than later.
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