Producing a battery for an electric car requires the extraction of hundreds of kilos of hard-to-source minerals, with a significant initial environmental impact. But the recycling of car's battery performance exhausted cars is rapidly changing the game, reducing the ecological footprint of electric vehicles and bringing closer the moment when their environmental advantage over combustion cars will become overwhelming even for legitimate skeptics, and even for some conspiracy theorists.
The initial impact of batteries
Traditional methods of extracting and refining battery materials require enormous amounts of energy. It cannot and must not be denied. As such, the initial carbon footprint of an electric car is higher than that of an equivalent internal combustion vehicle. These initial emissions are naturally compensated over time thanks to the greater efficiency of electric motors, leading to a 70% reduction in total emissions over the average life of the vehicle.
An analysis by BloombergNEF shows that an electric car must travel on average about 41.000 kilometers (25.500 miles) to equalize the emissions that arise in the production of an internal combustion car. An estimate that starts from a plausible assumption today. Which? That every electric car is made with freshly mined lithium, nickel and cobalt, as if all the materials end up in landfill at the end of the vehicle's life.
But that's not exactly what's happening, and above all it's not what will happen. An electric car battery is simply too valuable to throw away, and a new industry of recyclers is racing to recover it all.
The potential of recycling
Although still in its infancy, recycling an electric car battery is already profitable and capable of recovering more than 95% of key minerals.
A new analysis by researchers at Stanford University (still under review) found that the recycling process developed by a startup called Redwood Materials produces up to 80% less emissions compared to the traditional supply chain that uses CO2-intensive refineries.
This is enough to reduce the environmental breakeven time of an average electric car with an internal combustion vehicle to less than 24.000 kilometers (15.000 miles). Every kilometer starting from that is an "end of controversy" for the detractors of electric.
Electric car, the importance of clean electricity
The arguments of the skeptics, when in good faith, are correct. Accusing them of backwardness is foolish. The full assessment of when an electric car reaches break-even point with a combustion car MUST depend on the source of electricity used to produce the battery and charge the vehicle.
Cleaner electricity means a shorter “time to breakeven” (though even in areas that still get electricity from coal, electric cars ultimately win out).
For this reason, in a virtuous circle, the boom in renewable energy will also make electric cars increasingly less polluting. Solar installations have set annual records worldwide for 22 consecutive years and the pace appears to be accelerating, according to data from the International Energy Agency. In 2030, an electric car built from recycled materials could reach breakeven on emissions in just a few months.
Electric car, recycling is the future
The benefits of recycling are just starting to accumulate, he says Will Tarpeh, assistant professor of chemical engineering and one of the senior authors of the Stanford paper. This is because mass-market electric cars are still relatively new, and only a small number are ready for recycling.
The world is already on its way to recycling double the supply of lithium-ion batteries in 2024 compared to what was produced in 2014. When considering the environmental impact of an electric car, it is increasingly important to measure the footprint of incoming materials and how it is reduced when some inevitably get a second life.
As recycling grows to rival traditional mining and refining operations, simplicity will become more central to battery design, Tarpeh said.
Recycling will make up for the delay accumulated by batteries already produced. Not many consider recyclability when developing battery chemistry, but this is really starting to change.
Will Tarpeh
A more sustainable future
The advance of battery recycling represents a crucial turning point for the sustainability of electric vehicles. It drastically reduces emissions linked to the extraction and processing of minerals, and will make electric cars competitive from an environmental point of view with combustion ones in a much shorter time.
Of course there is still a long way to go. Battery recycling is still in its infancy and will have to grow in step with the spread of electric vehicles. But the direction is clear: in the future the electric car, thanks to recycling, will surpass the internal combustion one even more clearly.
Enough to convince even the most sceptical, except those accustomed to denying the evidence.
