Recycling! Former Tesla CTO is building a reverse Gigafactory

Former Tesla Chief Technology Officer JB Straubel is now the head of a new company called Redwood Materials, which is focused on recycling the lithium, nickel, cobalt and other valuable materials inside lithium-ion batteries and using them to make new batteries.

In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Straubel said that raw materials account for up to 75% of the total cost of lithium-ion batteries. Recycled materials will be cheaper than mining, refining and transporting new materials, which means recycling and reusing them will reduce the cost of batteries. This in turn will further accelerate the electric vehicle revolution and make electric vehicles more affordable. Straubel predicts that the process will be so efficient that almost 100% of the precious components of discarded batteries can be recovered and reused.

“We’re really recognizing that we need to build a gigafactory the other way around,” Straubel told the Journal. “I look ahead and see this freight train coming our way.” His vision goes beyond recycling batteries. Even in the best-run battery factories, scrap rates are as high as 10%, says Simon Moores, managing director of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. He predicts that by 2025, manufacturers could be producing 800GWh of batteries a year. If so, as much as 80GWh of batteries could be scrapped each year — the equivalent of all the batteries produced worldwide in 2016. That’s before a single used electric vehicle or energy storage battery is recycled. Straubel’s concept of a speeding freight train is entirely appropriate.”

Morse predicts that by 2025, the following amounts of raw materials could be recovered annually through recycling: 64,000 tons of lithium, 96,000 tons of graphite, 45,000 tons of nickel, 18,000 tons of cobalt, and 22,000 tons of manganese. The market value of these materials could be as high as $1.5 billion, he says, depending on commodity prices, which tend to fluctuate wildly over time. “Historically, the entire market has been driven by the commodity price of these metals,” Straubel says. “This is an opportunity to change the entire equation and realize material cost savings that will short-circuit the industry.”

On its official website, Redwood Materials presents its reason for existence: "Inventing sustainable materials to build the world", and also wrote: "Humanity has made great progress in sustainable energy production and transportation. We invented electronic devices and popularized them to every corner of the world, lifting billions of people out of poverty and entering the information age. As these trends develop and mature, when millions of electric vehicle batteries need a scrap solution, and when the electronic products piled up in your drawers at home begin to look for new life, Redwood is planning to solve the problems and opportunities that come with it."

“While we appreciate the staggering scale of materials involved in the world’s transition to sustainable energy, we also know that plans to ‘un-manufacture’ the batteries currently being manufactured are premature. We know that inventing circular supply chains, turning waste into profit and addressing the environmental impact of new products before they emerge… will save our planet.”

In its 2019 Impact Report, Tesla said it had started its own internal battery recycling program, recovering lithium, cobalt, aluminum, copper and steel from spent batteries at Gigafactory 1 in Nevada. "While fossil fuels are extracted and used once, the materials in lithium-ion batteries are recyclable," the report said. "When oil is pumped out of the ground, chemically refined, and then burned, it releases harmful gases into the atmosphere that cannot be recovered and reused. In contrast, battery materials are processed and put into a battery and will remain intact at the end of the battery's useful life because they can be recycled to recover valuable materials and used over and over again."

“Gigafactory 1’s closed-loop battery recycling process presents a compelling solution to shift energy supply away from fossil fuel-based acquisition, manufacturing and combustion, to a circular, recyclable model. From an economic perspective, we expect to see significant cost savings, as the cost of recycling and recovering battery materials at scale will be far lower than purchasing and transporting new materials.”

Tesla Gigafactory (Photo from Tesla's official website)

Panasonic, which produces batteries at the Gigafactory, is currently working with Redwood Materials to evaluate how to establish a long-term recycling program. According to Inside EVs, at the end of 2019, Panasonic began using Redwood Materials' technology to conduct trials at the Gigafactory, recycling more than 400 pounds of waste from the battery manufacturing process, and has now increased to 2 tons. All waste from the Nevada battery plant is now shipped to Redwood Materials. Celina Mikolajczak, vice president of Panasonic Energy North America and a former Tesla employee, said, "From an environmental perspective, Straubel's process seems more sustainable."

Among other battery recycling projects, Redwood Materials is by no means the only company concerned with battery recycling. The Chinese government now requires all battery manufacturers to have their own recycling programs. EV Obsession reports that Kia and SK Innovation have formed a new partnership that will focus on battery recycling and battery development for future electric vehicles. Northvolt and Norway's Hydro are designing recycling protocols for batteries and electric motors. Audi and Umicore are doing the same thing.

In the bad old days, old tires were dumped in piles in the woods, old lead-acid batteries were simply buried in landfills, and broken-down cars were left in the fields to rust. Today, as the concept of a circular economy becomes more widely accepted, such profligate behavior is no longer considered economically justifiable. As Redwood Materials points out, we can no longer just throw away our old junk. There are treasures in what is discarded. The push to reuse the raw materials inside lithium-ion batteries is based on the recognition that the earth’s resources are finite and should be conserved, not wasted.

(Original source: Clean Technology New Energy Network Comprehensive)