L R AS Published on Sunday 7 January 2018 - n° 216 - Categories:battery materials
What is the status of the industrial activity of dismantling lithium-ion batteries?
The Chinese administration has introduced a set of measures for the dismantling and recycling of used batteries from electric vehicles. The volume of used batteries, mainly lithium-ion batteries, will increase from 10,000 tonnes in 2016 to
120,000 or even 170,000 tonnes in 2020.
The market value of metals recovered from used batteries is estimated at $803 million in 2018, double that in 2020 and $4 billion in 2023. They contain nickel, cobalt, aluminium, manganese and iron, but their recovery requires various chemical treatments that are difficult to automate.
Failure to recycle used batteries would lead to serious environmental pollution.
At present, China's technical regulations are not comprehensive and no recycling system has yet been set up; recycling is encouraged, but there is no punitive mechanism for non-recycling. However, a large proportion of lithium-ion batteries have little or no economic value from a recycling point of view, resulting in a low willingness to recycle such batteries. The government can offer financial incentives such as tax reductions or subsidies. It can prohibit the production of batteries with no economic value for recycling.
Digitimes of 22 December 2017
Editor's note The information is interesting, not because of its administrative measures, but because of the difficulty for the industry to recycle lithium-ion batteries: it is clear that although the materials are particularly interesting, there are still no processes for separating the various components that would allow metals to be recycled under satisfactory economic conditions. This means that new batteries will have to include in their price their destruction or the price of their recycling. Unless it is possible to set up a deconstruction process. If these solutions are not satisfactory, consideration will have to be given to abandoning a technology which is too difficult to recycle and whose components (lithium, cobalt and even manganese) are too scarce on the earth's surface to constantly find new deposits of ore to replace the metals used in batteries which cannot be recycled economically.
Is there a new limit to the use of lithium-ion? It is too early to say, but the question must be kept in mind...
