Electric Cars Are Taking Off, but When Will Battery Recycling Follow?

“We’re weaning our total society off of fossil and carbon-intensive fuels — we are able to’t underestimate the size of that problem,” mentioned Gavin Harper, a analysis fellow on the College of Birmingham in England, who research battery recycling. “The demand goes to be so huge.”

However for all of the optimism, this new enterprise faces a frightening problem: Few batteries will likely be out there to recycle for a decade or extra. Tesla, which dominates the electrical automobile enterprise, started promoting vehicles in 2008 and till 2017 offered fewer than 100,000 vehicles a yr. There are different sources to recycle at present, together with hybrids and client electronics, however the provide is restricted and assortment may be difficult.

That has left recycling corporations in a tough place. They should put money into factories, equipment and staff or danger shedding floor to rivals. But when they make investments too rapidly, they might run out of cash earlier than a number of growing old batteries arrive at their loading docks.

“You may have folks which are simply burning via cash, since you don’t have the feed inventory to have the ability to make the fabric to promote,” mentioned Eric Frederickson, the managing director of operations for Call2Recycle, a nonprofit program that helps recyclers discover previous batteries.

The businesses even have to determine easy methods to discover, gather and dismantle batteries. They need to work with many dismantlers, scrap yards and nonprofit teams. And since batteries are vulnerable to fires and packaged and constructed otherwise from mannequin to mannequin, taking them aside may be difficult and harmful.

Amongst corporations recycling batteries, Redwood stands out. The corporate was based by J.B. Straubel, a former high Tesla govt, and has raised greater than $1 billion from traders, it mentioned. Redwood sees itself primarily as a producer of battery supplies — constructed from recovered or mined metals — and has established recycling partnerships with Ford Motor, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo. Redwood additionally recycles scrap from a battery plant run by Panasonic and Tesla, close to Reno, Nev.

On a flat, dusty tract of land close to that plant, Redwood is constructing out a 175-acre campus. There, the corporate recovers metallic from previous batteries and produces supplies for brand spanking new ones. Redwood introduced final week that it will spend no less than $3.5 billion on one other campus in South Carolina, in a area of the nation that’s quick turning into a hub for battery and electrical automobile manufacturing.