﻿In 2019, John Goodenough, Stanley Whittingham and
Akira Yoshino jointly won the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
"The discoveries of our laureates have led to a dramatic change in our society."
They invented and developed a technology that most of us use every day.
Often, without even noticing.
It's in our ear buds, smartphones, laptop computers,
cordless vacuum cleaners and electric scooters.
It's this. The lithium-ion battery.
This technology is key to us driving around without burning fossil fuels.
But what does it take to make all these batteries?
What do we do with them once they’re spent?
And why on earth are we playing
with LEGO in this video?
Let’s find out.
The automobile has brought comfort and independence to the lives of billions of people.
But guzzling ever-growing amounts of fossil fuels has also taken its toll on the climate.
"We have an energy crisis."
Thanks to lithium-ion batteries, we might now be entering a new era of mobility.
Because of their high energy density they’re perfect in electric vehicles.
For a relatively tiny package, they pack a big punch.
"The lithium-ion battery has really enabled
many parts of the decarbonization."
This is Hans Eric Melin.
He founded a research and consulting firm
focusing on lithium-ion batteries.
"For everything in mobility, lithium-ion batteries,
I would say, they have been a key technology, really.
The potential is so big in that sector,
we get such a scale in the production
and that brings the cost down of the batteries."
The global fleet of electric vehicles is predicted to grow immensely over the next decade.
From around 8 million – to 116 million.
This means the demand for lithium-ion batteries
will also shoot up.
And this is where we might run into some problems.
"Of course, it has a cost.
We need materials to produce the batteries and
any extractive industry has an impact
on the environment."
Lithium is – as you probably guessed pretty central to making a lithium-ion battery.
About 50 percent of the world's reserve of this alkali metal can be found here,
in the so-called "lithium triangle" across Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile.
Mining it involves pumping saltwater from underground lakes into pools
and letting it evaporate – a process that could harm the surrounding soil,
drain water supplies and contaminate the air.
Also, lithium is finite.
A study found we could run into serious trouble by mid-century, if demand keeps growing like this.
And then there's cobalt that also goes into lithium-ion batteries.
It's a metal mainly found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Its mining has often been linked to inhumane working conditions and child labor.
People exposed to it have suffered from lung disease or heart problems.
"Then you have also the energy that
is required to make these batteries.
And especially production of cells
requires a lot of energy."
And this means – CO2 emissions.
How much exactly really depends on the electricity mix of the producing country.
But according to recent figures, making just a small battery for a car like this could cause
more than four tons of CO2.
To give you an idea, that’s like driving a new diesel car bought in the EU
for about 33,000 kilometers.
The good news is that emissions are sinking as battery production becomes more efficient
and we shift towards cleaner energy sources.
The bad news is that the batteries are losing capacity over time.
So as there are more and more EVs, there will also be more and more spent batteries.
How do we deal with them?
“They should be recollected and selected, recombined and reused
in different purposes, in different applications.”
This is Ada Kong. She's worked on a report about this for Greenpeace East Asia.
“The battery that could be used in an electric vehicle is actually very powerful.
When they are used for like five to eight years, that couldn't really match with the needs
of being in a car. They still have enough performance for other functions.”
That's right, we can give spent car batteries a second life.
For example, they can be turned into energy storage for wind or solar.
They could power your next camping trip.
And they still have enough juice left to drive a forklift – or a boat.
And discarded EV batteries are already used for all these things today.
“We should extend the value and lifespan of [these] materials by reusing.
And after using up the original function of [those] products, they could be recycled
to raw materials and to produce more products.”
Let's get out the LEGO to understand how lithium-ion batteries get recycled.
It often involves smelting, so essentially heating them until they melt.
But, this uses lots and lots of energy, creates toxic emissions and loses some of the materials.
And that's why companies are coming up with new ways to recycle.
“You want to have, as much as we can, high value materials that have taken a lot of effort
to get out of the ground. We want to use those carefully and as many times as we can.”
This is Kunal Phalpher,
Chief Commercial Officer at Li-Cycle,
a lithium-ion battery recycling company from Canada.
“We've basically come up with a process designed specifically for this
to have high recovery rates of the material.
And the first stage, what we call our spoke, is a mechanical process that breaks down the batteries
and separates some of the fundamental materials.”
Very, very simply speaking, this is what happens.
The batteries are shredded while being submerged in a nontoxic solution.
This is important because it prevents them from catching fire and in the worst case blowing up.
Then materials like plastic, copper and aluminum are separated from
what the industry calls the "black mass". This contains the valuable materials
like cobalt, nickel, and lithium.
“The second part of the process is the hub. And this is really a bespoke hydrometallurgy
or wet chemistry process to process black mass into battery-grade materials.”
What this means is that different chemicals get added to the black mass
which leach out different elements.
These chemicals either make their way into the final products or are reused in the process –
so this doesn't actually produce any wastewater.
You end up with the black mass separated into its
single components, like lithium, cobalt, and nickel.
“The end goal is that as we pull them out of the batteries, we're putting them back into new batteries.
And that hasn't been achieved yet at a high scale. There's elements of it around the world.
But we want to help to continue to drive that forward.”
It is hard to keep track exactly how many lithium-ion batteries already get recycled –
mainly because they're often exported.
But it is already happening more and more, especially in Asia where most of them
are also produced.
And as volumes of spent batteries grow, it will also make even more
financial sense to recycle them.
“This is the end, in the ideal world, that we hope that there's no virgin minerals need to be mined
and all the minerals, materials that they already produced could be reused indefinitely.”
“The lithium-ion battery is already one
of the most circular products there is.
It's already reused today, and ultimately it's also recycled. We can optimize this
better and better. And the more batteries we have
on the market, the more obvious that will be.”
“Now, what do you think? Are lithium-ion batteries
really paving the way to a greener, more electric future?
Or is there actually another,
even more sustainable path?
Like building fewer cars altogether?
Let us know in the comments and hit subscribe for more videos like this every Friday.”