An important point is that li-Ion batteries need to be recycled one
tenth (or perhaps twentieth) as often as lead-acid. Even at the end of
their life in a car, unlike lead-acid, they have life left in them for
alternative uses. They slowly fade away instead of falling off a cliff.
These two facts add up to make recycling of li-ion batteries much less
of a problem than you might think at first. Indeed, you should recycle,
but if only 10% of the lead-acid batteries escape the recycling stream,
you are ahead of the game because li-ion batteries last at least 10
times longer. Plus, lead is toxic to the environment, while little in
li-ion batteries is toxic.
More to the point, lead-acid batteries are not recycled at "nearly 100%"
as claimed. If you look at the numbers provided by the lead industry
itself, at _least_ 30% of them escape the recycling stream.
Lead-acid batteries use 80% of all the raw lead produced every year.
However, only 50% of the raw lead comes from recycled lead, the other
50% is mined. (This percentage has been constant for many years.) This
means that 30% of batteries escape the recycling stream.
I suspect that the "95% recycled" number comes from the lead-acid
batteries that make it through the gate of the recycling facility. It
has to. If they truly reached these numbers, they wouldn't need to mine
much lead at all, not 50% of what is needed.
Bill D.
On 11/21/2019 5:18 AM, Lee Hart via EV wrote:
Peri Hartman via EV wrote:
I doubt many people are recycling laptop and phone batteries.
That's because it's nearly impossible to do so. Many of the places
that take small consumer batteries for recycling are not taking
lithiums, due to the (real or perceived) risk of fire.
But car batteries ? I assume nearly 100% are getting repurposed, at
least after a modest amount of time. And, in the future, probably
recycled.
I worry that industry won't recycle lithiums until they are *forced*
to do it. As long as it's even 1 cent cheaper to buy them new, and
landfill the waste, they will.
Lee
_______________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub
ARCHIVE: http://www.evdl.org/archive/index.html
INFO: http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org
Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
