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Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

Better question to ask: Are current EV companies even properly recycling the batteries?

The lithium itself is recyclable. However what’s the process for it? Is it so labor intensive that it makes recycling not worth it?

Remember: we were sold on the infinite recyclability of plastics. Yet look how that’s turned out. Industry did their own studies (in the 70s…), found recycling to not be cost effective (sorting issue, different types of plastic not recyclable, limited lifetime of plastic such that it could only be recycled a couple of times before becoming useless). Yet these companies still pushed this junk on us and we continue to live with those repercussions today.

Also battery packs are often packed with copious amounts of glue/adhesive and other items that don’t appear to be recyclable. Does that make the recycling process more difficult? As a battery pack in general, what can be recovered? What goes to the landfill?

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Yes, the industry is recycling their batteries at a fairly high rate.

Most of the recycling is post-industrial. After a battery is made, it's tested, and if it fails testing, it is recycled.

There hasn't been a large amount of post-consumer car battery recycling because there aren't many 20 year old car batteries out there. The reuse market for old batteries is higher than expected, and people reusing batteries pay more than recyclers. But the post-industrial plants are humming along, and will expand to accept post-consumer batteries once the supply arrives.

Everybody brings up the plastic-recycling bugbear. There are a bunch of reasons why plastic recycling is hard, most of which don't apply to batteries.

A better example is lead-acid battery recycling. The US has a >99% lead acid battery recycling rate. Lithium batteries are much larger and have a much higher content of valuable materials, so will be much more fruitful to recycle than lead acid batteries.

The main materials recovered out of batteries are nickel, copper and manganese, which are quite valuable. Lithium is secondary -- lithium batteries don't actually contain a lot of lithium, and lithium is cheap and common. New plants are set up to recover lithium because the price of lithium has increased, but old plants don't.

Wait we have a 99% lead acid battery recycling rate? I don't mean to be suspect but that seems suspiciously high - maybe pushed by an industry rep group or something. Similar to how oil and gas say they flare 99.5% of their fugitive emissions instead of it getting vented.

It's an easily falsifiable statement. If it's wrong the HN personality will not let it lie and proof that it's wrong will be quickly posted. It could be you!

I looked into it -- the Battery Council International is the one who promotes near perfect recycling rate. Listen - I'm sure its a high rate of recycling which should be celebrated. There's just no way its 99% that's all I'm saying. Maybe 99% of the components that make their way to e-waste get recycled but theres no way even 80% of batteries even make it to e-waste.

Ok, prove your claims

The amount of effort that I would have to put in in to refute the claims from an industry group that lobbies the Federal government (BCI) which includes both producers and recyclers is far to significant for the marginal gains of an upvote on HN. If you can't see the conflict of interest on the source of the 99% and the funding members of the BCI community and their interest that's on you.

Like I said I am sure its a high number but I very much doubt 99% and noone really has any incentive to try and find out what that real number is - its a waste of resources.

You don't have to refute the claims of an industry group. What you have to do is check their sources.

It also passes the smoke test. Who the heck is going to illegally discard a lead acid battery core, potentially risking hundreds of thousands of dollars of fines, when the alternative is collecting $20 from a recycler?

The core charge on lead acid batteries is really high. It'd be surprising if they weren't getting recycled the vast majority of the time. 99% sounds high, but I wouldn't say it is impossible.

Most place accepting lead car batteries will pay you for them. They are thus highly recycled for the same reason that copper is; there is a lot of incentive for random folks to seek out unrecycled batteries and recycle them.

I bet the precious metals in catalytic converters are also >99% recycled.

The core charge when you buy a new battery is a deposit returned to whomever returns the battery. Putting a $20 bounty on an item is a great incentive to have someone recycle them.

Counterpoint: they put a deposit/return on smaller plastic bottles and cans over here, but last year only 65% of cans were returned instead of just binned.

(as an aside I don't really understand that as cans and plastic bottles are easily separated from regular waste, but it's probably also down to reducing street waste, increasing consumer awareness, raising prices to consumers so they consume less disposable packaging, aaand get more money.)

The deposit is like 5-10 cents right? Might be too small for most people to notice. The car battery fee is like 15-30$ and is charged as a separate line item at the point of sale. Also the batteries are large and contain acid and are only taken out of the car once its time to buy a new battery and given straight to the shop that sells the new battery, all these incentives line up to make recycling essentially zero friction.

In Denmark the bottle return rate is 92%.

Collecting bottles like this allowed the plastic to be used for food-grade recycled plastic, which is not the case for general household waste.

Glas beer and soda bottles are washed and refused.

https://danskretursystem.dk/en/about-us/

I live in Oregon where the deposit is $0.10, and while plenty of citizens will toss cans, there are also plenty of people who will go through trash looking for them to return.

It's not difficult to believe that increasing the deposit 150x would correspondingly increase return rates.

Are you US based? And have you ever replaced a car battery? The store you buy your new battery from usually adds a charge to your new battery called a "core charge" that they refund to you if you bring your old battery. Plus the batteries are large and contain acid so people don't leave them lying around at home. This helps ensure high recycling rates.

It's still suspiciously high. Just think of all the car junkyards and countries that basically have no enforced regulations like rural India, China etc.

Scavengers scour those sites. A lead-acid battery is worth $20. They'd be stripped from any leftover cars instantly.

> Lithium batteries are much larger and have a much higher content of valuable materials, so will be much more fruitful to recycle than lead acid batteries.

You mean car lithium batteries. In general, lithium batteries recycling isn't as successful in general because most of them are so small (e.g. cell phone and laptop batteries).

>> New plants are set up to recover lithium because the price of lithium has increased, but old plants don't. <<

The price of lithium has collapsed by as much as 85% since 2022 Nov peak and is expected to drop further all the way through 2030. Other valuable raw materials in the cathodes have declined quite a bit past year.

I wonder how that's going to affect the future of battery recycling.

Lead acid batteries don't have expensive materials in them either.

It's cheaper to pull Lithium from an old battery than it is to refine it from raw.

> found recycling to not be cost effective.

Cost effective for who?

If you legislate that the producers of packaging have to pay for whatever system they choose to clean up after themselves then they tend to reduce how much plastic they use, and make what they do use easier to recycle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_producer_responsibili...

If you let them offload the costs as externalities, then they'll do whatever is cheapest for them, which is pretending to recycle.

> we continue to live with those repercussions today

I've yet to have an answer for what the repercussions in the developed world of non-recycling plastics actaully is. Once plastic is thrown away it can be put in landfill and my understanding is that landfills in the developed world are as a rule well sealed and the leakage is negligible. Landfilled plastic rather than recycled plastic means more oil gets turned into plastic rather than burnt for energy, increasing the price of oil and thus increasing investment in more carbon neutral energy sources.

So I struggle to see the benefits of cost-inefficient plastic recycling, particularly compared to all the other things that could be done with those man hours.

A lot of that plastic gets exported to other countries where landfills might not be as leak-proof, or gets thrown outside of dedicated spaces (like on the side of the road) and thus ends up in nature. There it directly damages wildlife (birds chocking on plastic bags and related), and/or breaks down into microplastics which are everywhere in water and animals, and we consume, with unclear effects on humans or biodiversity.

Furthermore, I don't get the link between increased plastics, price of oil and investment in carbon neutral energy. Price of oil is a delicate balance by OPEC to extract as much money as possible - they have drastically more capacity than they're currently pumping and exporting, and it's carefully managed, on purpose.

Reducing oil use is paramount to limit the damage to the planet; reducing plastic waste is too. Waiting for a potential cycle of "lots of plastic waste" -> "maybe prices of oil will go higher if OPEC stops existing" -> "maybe this will incentivise more investments in alternative energy sources" -> "maybe this will diminish plastic use" (how? according to market theories, the price of oil should go down if use goes down, so there will be even more incentive for plastic production; but as we discussed previously, oil is a very special market) is... not a good option.

But if the plastic is put in a local landfill (my local waste is) then is there any non-negligible harm?

(As an aside: I find it odd you seem to have plastic reduction as a similar priority to oil use reduction given the effects of climate change seem far more severe than even third world plastic disposal)

you realize that plastic is oil, right? plastic reduction is oil reduction.

> But if the plastic is put in a local landfill (my local waste is) then is there any non-negligible harm?

Wasteful consumption of oil for a single use. And your local landfill isn't set in stone, a natural disaster or neglect can release the trash in it in nature.

> (As an aside: I find it odd you seem to have plastic reduction as a similar priority to oil use reduction given the effects of climate change seem far more severe than even third world plastic disposal)

But we don't really know what the impact of all the plastic everywhere is, like we didn't (widely) know what the impact of lots of carbon emissions is. And when we started realising it, it was still drastically underestimate (see: every month is breaking temperature records at an unexpected pace). Reducing oil consumption by reducing plastic consumption, and also reducing the amount of plastic in nature, are both important. Both will prevent potential ecosystem collapses.

It's stupid to recycle when we can reuse first. There are nearly zero production EV batteries which are unsuitable for reuse for stationary applications. Even if the quantity is too low for mass commercial scale (first gen Leaf) they're still good for home backup or hobby projects.

I wouldn't say that EV companies are, but the battery recycling businesses are working pretty hard at it. It won't really get started until there are more EV batteries to recycle. Volumes are still relatively low compared to the number of new packs being built, as the packs tend to last for a long time.

Even post-crash packs often get reused rather than recycled.

> Better question to ask: Are current EV companies even properly recycling the batteries?

Tesla has set this up, but hasn't recycled many batteries yet since they mostly get second lives in at home "power walls" (which I guess, is why the started up that business?). We have another 5-10 years before those batteries start needing to be recycled.

I think at this point I'd take some trash if it means net negative CO2 emissions

> we were sold on the infinite recyclability of plastics

Really? I thought plastic won because it's cheap. I never heard about anyone recycling it.

Yes. These things can both be true: We were sold on plastics being very recyclable, and hardly anyone ever actually recycles them. It's not a contradiction, it's a deception.

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