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Comment by ChancyChance | Hacker News Reader

How many EV batteries are decommissioned each year, i.e., could be recycled? This company can handle 70,000 per year according to the article, but what is that number out of?

Side note about consumer lithium batteries: The nearest lithium recycling near me is 40 miles away, and it costs $$ to drop of your stuff. I can afford that, but I doubt most Americans properly dispose of their batteries. Heck, I have a neighbor who burns his trash near the road and one time saw him burning a few car batteries in the pile.

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Not many. Not including a few larger recalls (Hyundai Kona for example), the battery replacement percentage for EVs is under 5%. The rest are still running on the original battery.[0]

This is the biggest limit for re-using and recycling EV batteries, the damn things just won't die.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/electric-car-battery-models-...

it almost feels like old appliances, back when product was new and every little part was slightly over engineered resulting in those whirlpool washing machines lasting several decades

That's a very optimistic take. Old appliances cost 10x as much as modern ones (inflation adjusted). If we can chop the price on batteries 10x, that would be awesome.

Is that because the average age of battery is still young? Haven’t EVs exploded in last 5 years? It’ll take time for replacements to be a significant number relative to EV number.

From the article, they actually get most of their waste material from battery factories, which is interesting.

> "That’s not to say there are enough old batteries coming in to fill the factory. Currently, 80 to 90 percent of what’s going into Ascend’s Covington facility is scrap materials from battery factories, including SK Battery America’s plant in Commerce, Georgia."

Eventually we'll have a lot more end-of-life batteries, but for now most of the EV battery packs that have ever been made are still in the middle of their respective bathtub curves.

Not a lot yet. Most of the batteries produced are still being used. A decade ago there barely were any EVs on the road. Production volumes at Tesla were in the thousands per year, not per week. Most of those cars are still driving fine. And by now, most manufacturers give eight year warranties on their batteries and drive trains. Meaning, they don't expect them to start failing until long after that date.

You are thinking about this wrong. The value of the lithium inside those cars is higher than a lot of second hand ICE cars. There can be tens of kilos of lithium in a typical EV. The price of lithium is about 30-40$/kilo currently. That could come down. But it's way more valuable than iron, lead, aluminium, etc.

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