- This is a battery,
and it's about to get what it deserves...
a shredding.
Why do this?
Well, all batteries are slowly betraying you.
And despite what this shady rabbit might have told you,
they don't keep—
- 'Going and going and going.'
- Even with rechargeable batteries,
every time you charge them and discharge them,
they get a little bit worse.
And then eventually, you have a drawer
full of dead smartphones,
or a garage full of dead Teslas.
- We're looking at about 500,000 tons of batteries
needing to be recycled right now.
And in the future, we're looking
at millions upon millions of tons globally.
- These folks are part of a project
to change the way we recycle batteries,
and entirely rethink the way we make them.
- From the material science standpoint,
we're trying to change the way batteries are made,
reduce the energy usage,
reduce the greenhouse gas emissions,
reduce the waste from it.
- To make an all-electric infrastructure
into a reality, we're gonna need to get
a lot better at this
because it's getting harder and harder
to find the raw materials we need for batteries.
- But also, it is absolutely necessary
to wear safety glasses in here.
- No exceptions?
- No exceptions.
- Well, if pop culture has taught us anything,
it's that when people put their goggles on,
stuff is about to get real.
Put on your safety glasses for
"Hard Reset,"
a series about rebuilding our world from scratch.
Battery recycling might not seem super important,
but it's like Manhattan Project-important.
Batteries impact every aspect of our lives,
and they're only getting more essential.
So we came to Argonne National Lab outside Chicago,
to meet Jeff—
who is not this bird.
There he is.
He is the Director of ReCell,
a nationwide project aimed at making battery recycling
more affordable and more effective.
He also knows the best battery jokes.
- Oh (bleep).
I totally flopped on it.
- Okay, he knows no battery jokes, my mistake.
But he does know why we need to get better
at recycling them.
- Over here is a battery.
This is out of an EV,
actually it's a plug-in hybrid, a Chevy Volt.
The first set of lithium-ion vehicles
came online around 2012,
and those warranties are 8 to 10 years.
So let's say 10 years, so that's 2022.
Here we are.
- In the past decade,
millions of EV batteries have entered the world,
and as they stop working,
we're gonna see a literal mountain
of dead EV batteries.
- I would say about six years before the wave really hits—
at that point, we're gonna hit about a million tons
of end-of-life batteries per year in EVs.
That number just stands out to me.
- The biggest problem is that batteries
are all slowly going bad,
like mayonnaise left out on the table,
or at least that's how I think of it.
- Inside a battery, while it's running and sealed,
there's a number of different mechanisms
for how they go bad.
Electrolyte is the liquid.
It'll actually react with the different electrodes,
and form films that basically dries out the liquid.
It also eats up all the lithium in it.
So that's also bad.
Stuff is breaking apart.
Losing contact blocks the flow of lithium ions in and out.
That's obviously bad.
So there's a lot of ways for things to go bad
in these batteries.
- So, more complicated than mayonnaise.
We're gonna call that a "yes."
Basically, once a battery stops working,
it's recycled by shredding it
and separating all the parts.
Then, just like in the movies,
they use heat, pyro-
- 'Goodbye.'
- Or acid, hydro-
- To reduce them back down
to their component atoms.
- So pyro- and hydro-technologies
have been around for hundreds,
even thousands of years—
very old technologies.
We're actually just kind of adapting them for batteries.
You're taking it right back to the atom,
which is brand new—
I mean, they never get old—
and you can make a brand new battery out of it.
- All of this shredding and melting works just fine,
but it's kind of like recycling paper by
turning it into compost for new trees.
There's just gotta be a better way.
- ReCell is taking a little bit different approach.
It's called 'direct cathode recycling.'
- So direct recycling means we get to skip
dissolving the materials
or processing them back into metals,
and instead, actually try to keep those materials
as they are in a battery,
so we don't have to remake them
at the end of the process.
- And the reason that's important
is because when you dissolve it in acid
or you melt the metal in a furnace,
you destroy all the energy of having to make that
back into a cathode,
and that can be half the cost of the cathode.
- So we're really focused on that
because it will reduce the energy costs,
it'll reduce the greenhouse gas emissions,
and it'll reduce the waste involved as well.
So overall, if we can make that work,
it'll be a huge win from the recycler's standpoint;
a huge win for the environment.
- Direct recycling would make batteries
way easier to recycle,
but it would also require that we rethink
how we design and build them from the ground up.
That kinda sounds like a 'hard reset.'
Batteries designed for direct recycling
might look very different
from the form factors we're used to.
- So if I was to design a battery,
the first thing I would do is make batteries
more easy to disassemble.
Some of the batteries use glue to hold parts together,
that actually makes it very difficult to take them apart.
And then, make it as easy as possible
to get it back down to individual cells.
- There's a great idea of:
'If I take this battery
and I dip it in a solution and the pouch melts off,
and then you rinse it off
and you put it in the next solution,
and the cathode powder falls off,
then you do the next.'
So that would be the ultimate design for recycle.
- Wow, it sounds like we solved battery recycling
halfway through this episode.
So high fives, everybody,
even you, bearded me.
- The problem is, when you make a product,
you can't make recycling the first metric.
- Hey, Jeff, don't be so negative.
Oh, snap. That's a battery joke.
- It's important that we get in with the manufacturers
and say, "Hey, before you do that,
make sure there's no design features that make it
so it's hard to recycle."
- Direct recycling is just one way
to make it more affordable to recycle
than mining raw materials out of the ground.
Another one is scale.
Ironically, this problem might get easier
as it gets bigger.
- Right now, there's just not that much battery material
to recycle, so it's smaller capacities, not as efficient.
As more and more batteries come to end of life,
the plants can get bigger, and those economies of scale
will start to take over.
It's actually exciting to me to think
making those batteries out of those materials,
we can lower the cost of future batteries.
- Right now, lots of batteries end up in landfills,
which is terrible,
or just sitting in your garage, which is also not great.
But if we can make recycling batteries profitable,
that will provide the incentive needed
to bring batteries back in, and recapture those elements.
That's not a theory by the way.
It's been done before with car batteries.
- Lead-acid batteries are a great example.
You put them at the curb, people will take them,
and somebody picks it up for recycling,
that's when you've hit circular economy.
- The material that goes into batteries
has to come from somewhere.
Right now, we mainly mine it out of the ground.
We rely on places like Russia for nickel,
or the Congo for cobalt;
China and Australia for lithium.
Some of these places have much better human rights
or environmental protections than others.
But we wouldn't need to mine as much
if we could just get better at recycling
what we already have.
So picture a scenario where we get much better
at recycling batteries.
A future with a recycle-friendly battery
is one where we can use electricity
to replace more and more of our energy infrastructure.
Aside from just reducing the emissions
of vehicles, EV batteries could totally change
how our electric grid works.
- I think batteries are one
of the most critical technologies moving forward
in the world today.
So right now, we actually have to throw away
a lot of electricity, particularly from solar
and wind power.
We can use the vehicles as a battery-backup source
for the entire grid.
If we can make enough batteries
or other storage solutions,
we can actually completely change
how that functions,
and change the way we produce energy,
and no longer burn fossil fuels,
no longer pollute the atmosphere.
- If we can design a battery
that is optimized for recycling
and then convince people to actually recycle it,
we might be able to build the world we wanna live in,
with what we've already got.
It's kind of insane to think
we'd do things any other way, really.
I mean, if we lived on a spaceship
with a finite amount of resources,
we couldn't get away without building things
that were designed for recycling.
And in case you didn't realize it,
we do live on a spaceship.
It's just really big.
Real, real big.
Come back next time
for another episode of "Hard Reset."
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