Electric vehicles: battery overload
To avoid old batteries ending up in landfill sites, recycling on a huge scale will be necessary
The scramble to electrify the world’s vehicles is storing up a problem that could give advocates a nasty shock. Safely dealing with a looming glut of used EV batteries will require a drastic expansion of current recycling facilities.
The lithium-ion batteries employed in today’s electric vehicles are expected to have a useful life of up to a decade. After that, the batteries either need to be repurposed for alternative use or recycled. By 2026 global recycling needs could outstrip existing capacity by almost 10 times.
Finding an alternative use is the first choice; batteries can be used in homes to store power generated from solar panels, for example. Even so that might extend their lifespan by just five years. To avoid batteries ending up in landfill sites, recycling will be necessary.
A conservative eight-year estimate of battery life could mean 1.1m batteries or 274,000 tonnes of material — metals such as nickel and cobalt — globally in need of recycling or re-use by 2025. That could rise to more than 3m units or 800,000 tonnes in 2026. This would dwarf current recycling capacity, estimated at 85,000 tonnes per year evenly split between Europe and China.
A new 20,000-tonne recycling facility could cost up to $200m and take at least five years to design and build, analysts estimate. Groups such as Umicore of Belgium, with existing capacity of 7,500 tonnes, should begin expanding in the next few years. Safe disposal of waste is an necessary speed bump to a hopeful, rapid take-up of electric vehicles.