Benefits of the Battery Recycling Chain
Batteries have long been important to how people interact with energy in their daily lives: from their personal electronics to toys for their kids to their vehicles (electric or gasoline powered). Despite their importance and ubiquity, most people rarely stop to really consider what batteries are enabling on a fundamental level or why they are so transformative. When electricity is generated, it’s sent across the grid and once it reaches its end destination it is consumed immediately. Electricity is entirely made of moving electrons, so for the most part, this transfer happens instantaneously or the power can’t be used. But battery technologies take away the urgency and allows users to take energy to be used where and when it’s needed.
Over the years, the cost, efficiency, and even sizes of batteries have evolved, but so too have the key end uses. Today, advanced battery technologies are enabling:
Electric vehicles (EVs) to transform transportation
Solar generation that allows households and businesses to be less reliant on the grid
Utilities to build more large-scale renewable energy assets that can charge batteries when intermittent energy resources are abundant and then only deploying them to the grid when they’re most needed.
But as batteries become more popular and more advanced, some key considerations are coming into focus, notably core metals and materials that make up batteries (including lithium, graphite, cobalt, manganese, and others) and their relative cost, geological sourcing, and sustainability of procurement.
In many ways, the battery sector is thriving amid the goal of ensuring that they present an environmentally beneficial solution. Thus, a key area of focus for leading battery manufacturers is optimizing and investing in the battery recycling chain.
Key Battery Characteristics
The most common type of battery today for the aforementioned use cases is lithium-ion (LI), and this technology is likely to remain the dominant battery type for some considerable time. LI batteries are a common solution because:
They are long lasting (at least 1,000 charging cycles, usually more)
They don’t suffer from the memory effect (the weakness of other battery technologies wherein repeated partial discharge followed by recharge result in losing their full charge capacity)
They are particular efficient (they charge with nearly 100% efficiency)
They are affordable (and getting cheaper over time)
The average LI battery is composed of the following materials, by proportion of weight:
Graphite (16%)
Aluminum (15%)
Copper (10%)
Cobalt (7%)
Manganese (5%)
Lithium (7%)
Nickel (4%)
Other Materials (36%)
This material breakdown is notable because many of these materials are difficult to source affordably and sustainably. Many of these critical materials come from geographically limited locations, which can create supply chain challenges. For example, the United States gets 91% of its imports of lithium from Argentina and China alone, while the Democratic Republic of Congo provides 70% of the world’s entire Cobalt supply. Being reliant on these sources of material production is a challenge for the battery industry because a single government may make decisions that interrupt global supply chains, while the ethical concerns about how some of these materials are mined in other nations can cause challenges as well. These issues highlight the need to get the most mileage out of the materials once they are in the battery supply chain to maximize their use and dampen the demand for new, virgin material extraction.