(20-01-2025, 02:53 PM)harm_less Wrote:(20-01-2025, 01:06 PM)nzoomed Wrote: Yeah i bet alot of water is required in the process, hopefully they have systems that recycle the water in the process, i would expect this is the case, no doubt they have the plant running on solar like their gigafactory in Texas too. Im guessing in another 10+ years or so that there will be a bit more of an influx of lithium batteries for disposal that will make their way back into the supply chain and that recycling plants will grow to fill the market.You might want to acquaint your e-waste company with UpcycleNZ, and be aware that EV batteries are able to be upcycled multiple times before they need to be recycled. The biggest single barrier to EV battery recycling schemes including Redwood Materials who is the ex Tesla guy you mention is a shortage of feedstock due to EV batteries not reaching end of life in sufficient quantities.
I remember a while back that another company started by an ex-tesla employee has built a recycling plant so there is an emerging market to recover the lithium, currently I dont know anyone in NZ who takes lithium batteries, the e-waste company i take dead electronics to says that they dont have anyone in NZ who takes the batteries yet so sadly they go to landfill.
Sodium ion looks quite promising and could be a good incentive for more water desalination plants to be built, particularly in oil rich nations such as Saudi Arabia where they will be needing to diversify their economy out of oil.
I think it will be a way off for practical use in EV's anytime soon, but will be great for home solar energy storage, I think they still dont quite have as good a cycle life as lithium, but each generation is improving.
The landfill scenario you mention is far more likely to occur for small appliance batteries such as in laptops, phones and the like. I've tried to pass this responsibility onto our local council in the past by leaving the batteries I asked them about on their public counter but I suspect that these just got transferred into their garbage, though hopefully a laptop battery that recently died on me and was 'taken care of' by the repairer ended up in a recycling scheme of some description.
Thats good to see that there is a company here that has the ability to recycle them, and they are right that the main issue is no EV battery packs have reached them because there are so few out there that are at the point of needing recycling, that will change in about another 10 years.
Yes the big issue is with many battery packs from power tools, laptops, phones etc that are going straight to the landfill, I should see if this crowd knows much about upcycle, it appears they have only been operating for a fairly short time and looks like they currently are exporting the batteries overseas for recycling at this stage, i guess this will change once volumes increase enough to make it viable.
These batteries do make great reuse for solar storage, I know someone who has a salvaged tesla battery running his whole home off solar.