Just as important as recycling these batteries is making it possible for older EVs to have their batteries replaced years down the road with 3rd party batteries.
In 2031, it should be possible to by a long-past-warranty 2021 EV, replace the battery pack (with one made from recycled EV batteries!), and have it just-work. Just like you can replace the engine of a classic car today if you are so inclined.
It should be possible because the electrical connection of the batteries to EV drivetrains are relatively simple - although I'm sure that will take a lawsuit (like was launched against Nespresso to allow 3rd party coffee pods) for EV manufacturers to release the specs required for this to happen.
It would be unfortunate if EV batteries were non-serviceable except by the manufacturer after they were out of warranty, like phones are today. Instead, battery replacement would potentially allow the tertiary used EV market to flourish, and make them more accessible to people of modest means.
You can put a battery from a crashed 2021 Leaf in a 2015 Leaf.
There's little the non-Tesla automakers are doing to stop you. They aren't helping you, but they aren't stopping you. The biggest problem is there's basically no market for it right now. I used to build stuff for this market (more-or-less). Only a tiny fraction of vehicles need anything. It's far cheaper to sell your vehicle to someone who doesn't mind 70 miles range and buy a new one with all the scale advantages of mass manufacturing than paying for the shop labor ($100-300/hr) and amortized cost of a battery few people want.
This makes me more pessimistic that "the markets" will ever fix something related to anything where the negative effects are seen a decade down the road. We will switch to an electric fleet to "save the environment" and in 20 years we will throw our collective hands up in the air and see that "yup, that didn't work".
Economic activity nearly always has negative externalities. Our economic model is based on ever growing economic activity, and coupled with population growth this produces ever mounting externalities. We treat these externalities separately, as individual problems to solve, first clean air, then clean water, then fixing the ozone hole, now fighting global warming. Every time that we “solve” these problems we cause new externalities to pop up. Even if we “solve” climate change, something else will pop up. Perhaps the impact of chemicals on biological reproduction? That is building up steam and would be even bigger to tackle than climate change.
The classic environmentalist solution is to live a smaller life, with fewer things. That is a hard sell and runs counter to innate human instinct to gather resources. On the other hand, economic policy can’t seem to move past fighting symptoms, and does its very best to pretend the growth model isn’t the root cause of all environmental problems. Does anyone have a handle on a real and pragmatic solution I wonder?
Thank you for being tuned into my pessimism and helping me paint an even bleaker picture! =D No but seriously that was a very thought-provoking reply and I'm personally very aligned with the classic environmentalist solution but equally desoriented on how that could be "sold" on a global scale as a way of living. My political leanings is showing here so it comes as no surprise that my analysis is that the issue is with that sneaky quoted word. "Selling" an idea implies rational actors that could "buy in" to the "small life lifestyle" and reject the options readily available on the market, which would be a (potential) life abundant with short term kicks and a dopamine filled days with an endless supply of various things that are fun and "help" us in our daily life (but in the end will destroy earth). Which indeed is a hard sell, primarily because we aren't rational economical agents that can weight "guaranteed happiness the next decade" vs "my children potentially living in a desert fighting for scrap in 50 years".
History shows that individuals and groups equipped with the mindset of accumulating wealth and power will not yield their "progress".
This means society may tend to fall back to authoritarian systems like feudalism, when put under increasing external pressure.
The struggles and lack of coordination caused by this failure to act as a collective with modern technology present will lead to a fast and indiscriminate decline of the worlds population, I think.
What about an authority that could price negative externalities into the goods as they were discovered? I think there are extremely high challenges around enforcing this globally, and resisting the pressure from industries that are impacted, but it would seem to be the least disruptive in terms of modifying the fundamentals of our existing capitalist system.
This is an odd straw man to bring out, when the goal is very explicitly to reduce carbon output. Also nothing so far implies that the legislation is impossible to fix once the electric fleet exists.
Approaching ten years of life, most of these cars have lost <10% battery life (and loss is fairly linear in lithium) so in 20 more years we'll have cars with 70% of their original battery life. They'll still be perfectly usable for many people. So long as fossil-fueled vehicles are in use, let's get more EVs on the road instead of upgrading the ones we have.
The thing about phones and laptops is that they have the excuse that miniaturization makes this necessary (it's still an excuse but it's better cover). And current systems essentially have the lifetime of the battery.
Cars should be a different story but we'll have to fight for that even.
And ingress protection, which requires excellent seals, which need a bit of know-how (i.e., a shop) to correctly reapply. At least that's what I like to tell myself.
Battery packs are structural components for safety reasons more than anything. Weight and volume savings are secondary to safety in regards to anything with high energy density, be it a battery pack, fuel cell, or gas tank.
But though they _contain_ batteries, a battery pack is not a battery any more than a car is an engine. The battery inside the battery pack remains non-structural and non-load-bearing.
>with the battery cells helping to solidify the platform as one big unit
The individual cylinders are made from steel. The steel is used structurally. Perhaps next you'll tell me the "battery" is actually just the anode, cathode and electrolyte?
As far as I can tell so far no one has used the individual cell cylinders as load bearing components, only the battery box. Tesla's "structural battery" is aiming to do that and have the individual cell cylinders carry loads.
You're right! My brief skim of the article overlooked that very important detail.
Thank you.
> Perhaps next you'll tell me the "battery" is actually just the anode, cathode and electrolyte?
No, next I'll tell you that this isn't Reddit and you don't have to be a dick to "win an argument on the internet". On HN you can simply point out the facts, like you did above.
It depends on 1 ("one") legislation. Its not like theres inherently anything stopping this from happening except the insatiable hunger of some rich dudes. I believe the EU is forcing the iphones to have usb-c?
I've swapped batteries in iphone and macbooks several times. Just because the manufacturer doesn't really want you to do it doesn't mean you can't do it.
Interfacing with the existing car's electronics gets into "right to repair" technology, with some manufacturers being more open than others.
Unfortunately battery packs are very vehicle-specific. Hopefully we'll eventually see some standardized form factors so you can just install a generic battery. Until then, 3rd parties will have to make a different battery pack for each model they want to support. Most of the problem is just the physical dimensions and shape of the pack, but also there are a bunch of electrical connections, battery-management system (BMS) integration, coolant hoses, and so on that would vary from one vehicle to the next.
Hopefully as the technology matures, batteries get physically smaller and lighter, and therefore easier to shoehorn into weird spaces.
Gogoro is a taiwanese company that makes scooters where the battery is a power pack that you can just replace in a few seconds[1].
They're apparently expanding into more countries. I really like the concept of these things. It should be possible to make drivein charging stations for cars that do the same. But obviously you wouldn't be able to do that manually and designing such a system is a lot more expensive.
Such a smart solution, I hope they go global with it!
I've been thinking of a similar solution for e-bikes and electric scooters (like Bird and Lime for example). Swapping a battery would be SO MUCH BETTER than having to fully recharge your own battery.
If I had to make a prediction for 50 years in the future, I'd guess that Tesla and others would study a way to hot-swap batteries in the car at the "e-Station" in a couple minutes instead of waiting for your own battery to recharge.
> Just like you can replace the engine of a classic car today if you are so inclined
How this works is usually you would replace/fix individual parts of the engine until it works again. When you buy one ready to swap in, it's because a third party has taken the time to fix up an old engine - usually with no help from the original manufacturer.
A lot of car parts you cannot buy new replacements for. Engine parts you usually can, as pretty much everything there is consumable, but I mean things like body panels or interior parts. However a lot of cars end up damaged beyond repair, which means there are usually enough parts in the surrogate market so old cars can be kept running.
In this case it's not reasonable to ask manufacturers to be selling new battery packs 10 years after discontinuing that model, but they should make sure it's possible for third parties to make/remake them and have them behave the same as an OEM battery pack.
> It should be possible because the electrical connection of the batteries to EV drivetrains are relatively simple
While this could be true, I certainly wouldn't assume it to be so. I dunno how integrated the battery pack is to the system - when you press the gas, does the car do things like draw more from some cells and less from others based on their degradation and capacity? Certainly on the charge side of the system it's very integrated, with the charge curve changing as individual cells (or at least modules) age/degrade.
A battery pack on a modern EV is typically just a bunch of cells wired together in series, or a bunch of parallel groups of cells in series. There isn't anything to cause power to be pulled from one group of cells versus another -- if that happens, it's a problem because it would cause the cells to get out of balance. (You'd typically have a "battery management system" whose job is to monitor cell voltages and bleed off little power from cells that are reading too high to keep everything properly balanced. But that happens very slowly, and at low voltages and current.)
As far as the motor controller is concerned, the battery might as well just be a single cell. If you change to a different kind of battery, you might need to change some of the motor controller's parameters (like maximum current limit) if those were designed around the limits of the old battery.
edit to add: when it comes to the charger and BMS, that stuff might or might not have to be replaced depending on the extent to which it can be made to work with a different configuration. And just like replacing an engine in a modern gas-powered car, there's probably a host of sensors that will trigger a whole host of warnings if they aren't reconnected to equivalent new sensors or spoofed in some way.
The part which deals with all this is the battery management system, and it's almost always integrated into the battery itself, for reasons of practicality, safety, and seperation of concerns. Its interface to the rest of the car and charging system is fairly straightforward: mostly it just needs to report state of charge and current limits for charging and discharging (chargers for these packs are rarely anything more than a constant current supply being controlled by the BMS). It can in theory provide more detailed information but this is just diagnostic, not something the user or any other part of the system can really take action on (for example there's no way in current EV packs for the motor to draw from specific cells more than the others).
Basically the only way for car manufacturers to make this interface hard to replicate with third-party packs is by introducting some kind of DRM-like signatures on the messages from the BMS.
The question is whether the necessary brains are part of the pack or part of some other component in the car. But in any case, if we require the specs to be open, third parties can build compatible batteries.
Unfortunately some OEM's have decided that structural batteries are the way of the future. Real difficult replace something that's a integral structural member of the car
There has been this myth around that 'structural' means 'non replaceable'. This is complete nonsense made up by ignorant people who dislike Tesla.
Structural packs are nothing new, even cars like the iPace have structural packs and so do many. Hell even the Model S was structural and that had a swapable battery. Tesla or BYD structural packs are no different.
The actual innovation when people talk about 'structural packs' nowdays is that the cell themselves are part of the structure. However, this has nothing to do with how the pack is connected to the car.
Sadly the discussion on these topic gets totally confused by people endlessly repeating the same myths without understanding what they are talking about.
Just don't get into a car crash without the pack inside.
> Real difficult replace something that's a integral structural member of the car
If you look at some recent photos [1] of the Tesla Berlin tour, the "structural battery pack" is still a bolt-in part of the car - it just carries some of the loads and has the seats bolted to it. If it's a standardized design, eg used for multiple model years, it should be a fairly standard replacement part in another decade or so. And the more efficient structural will reduce steel consumption by thousands of tonnes per year and reduce curb weight and increase mileage. Win-win-win for the environment.
Nice link, looks like they still might have enough meat on the chassis to not require weird temporary structural bracing when unbolting the pack. It's almost like a body-on-pack, like the body-on-frame of old.
Because an engine change on a modern ICE car is far from easy. In major part because of the same bullshit with electronics incompatibility caused by manufacturers.
Wrong serial numbers on injectors/ECU/sensors? Welp, fuck you, buy compatible original parts or swap the whole engine, every little wire and all.
It's like needing to swap the battery+controller+motors on an EV.
Then again, government regulations play a part here, at least in Europe. Can't just have you riding around in your now "custom" car.
We need to design devices such as batteries for recycling and long life from the design phase of the products. Solid-state Lithium batteries will probably be easier to recycle due to no sandwiching. "The immediate benefit of switching from a liquid to solid electrolyte is that the energy density of the battery can increase. This is because instead of requiring large separators between the liquid cells, solid state batteries only require very thin barriers to prevent a short circuit." This separator material complicates recycling in conventional Lithium ion batteries.
Instead of assuming we have endless resources we should design all products to recyclable from the start design phase. This is to lessen global warming and environmental impact.
Absolutely. A friend - who has passed away - had a great idea: tax companies for resources consumed. That would go a long way towards treating everything that we mine as precious, rather than just those items that we can already see the bottom of the barrel on (and taking into account that mining is creating an enormous amount of pollution).
Properly designed items should be easier, cheaper and quicker to recycle than to start with a mining step. One of the important bits here is now the various materials are joined, specifically, gluing is a barrier to recycling, as are various surface coatings. This is where I think we could make a very quick step in the right direction by designing not just for manufacturing costs but also for the cost of breaking the produced item up into its constituent elements.
Penalties for the fraction that can not be reliable returned to its pre-manufacture state, as well as an automatic obligation to take back and recycle any product produced.
One of the comments made was that consumers assume recycling works as a kind of magical "Get out of Pollution Free" card. In reality, the system we have only works if there are companies that want to actually use the recycled materials. If there are none, it just gets landfilled.
I bring this up because one of the things mentioned was Pringles cans. Everyone thinks they are recyclable. But the can is two sheets of cardboard glued over a thin sheet of aluminum. The paper companies don't want the cans because they don't want to somehow deglue the cardboard from the aluminum (time and cost expensive to process), and ditto for the aluminum people. So the cans just get thrown out.
In fact some people make arguments that recycling programs do more harm than good, because they allow consumers to alleviate their guilt about waste without actually helping the environment. The cynic may say that's intentional.
> consumers assume recycling works as a kind of magical "Get out of Pollution Free" card.
Consumers were told that by the local authorities who put these recycling programs in place. They were not told that behind the scenes it all goes to the landfill anyway. If they knew the truth they might actually make more effort to reduce the amount of stuff they throw out and be more aware of wasteful packaging.
I really see this as a problem further up the chain - why is wasteful packaging even on the shelves? Why is there so much crap to throw out? Why was it legal to wrap a product in another 25% of its weight in useless, non-recyclable packaging? I'm not sure why I as an individual am forced to bear the brunt of colossally wasteful pipelines and processes that I had no say in. I can do a bit and reuse bags, buy stuff with minimal packaging (or avoid buying new stuff etc.), but broadly, I have no choice most of the time.
I've started to give bad reviews to products with wasteful packaging that I couldn't see before purchase. If there's multiple cubic feet of styrofoam, I will leave a bad review mentioning only the packaging complaint so that future purchasers will know too.
100% agreed, this is exactly the problem. Just take a pack of yoghurt, we had good paper packaging and now they've glued a useless plastic port to it. Boom, no longer recyclable. Same with cheese and other bread toppings, all used to be packaged in perfectly recyclable paper and now it's sold in see-through plastic.
See through plastic can be both recycleable and biodegradable and might even use less ressources to produce, and improve the shelf life so that less food is wasted. Details are very important in these matters, which is why it's a bad idea to put the burden of figuring this all out on consumers.
The solution is to standardise packaging so that it can be re-used by multiple brands and companies, with just a clean out and new set of logos glued on.
This might not be suitable for a Pringles can, but at least suitable for glass containers and bottles.
Fifty years ago, soda was generally sold in returnable glass bottles, which would be trucked back to the bottling plant, sanitized, and reused. But that was too inconvenient, I guess. First came thin glass disposables, and then plastic took over. At least aluminum cans (and steel, for that matter) are readily recyclable.
Coca-Cola bottles had their originating bottling plant stamped into the bottom.
The energy and water costs of cleaning and sanitizing reusable containers can be very substantial. It seems nicer to "reuse" a bottle, but it may genuinely be the case that it's less impactful to just make a new one (preferably out of recycled materials).
isn't that just because the externalized costs of plastic disposables are passed along to society and the environment rather then paid by the manufacturer/consumer?
It depends greatly on how you estimate those externalized costs.
A plastic soft-drink bottle https://www.polisanhellas.com/products-pet-preform.html is about 30 grams of extremely chemically inert material, produced for a tiny energy cost from about 30 grams of crude oil, that goes to a landfill and stays there for, probably, millennia. So a single barrel of oil makes about 5,000 plastic bottles. Each bottle embodies about 1200 kJ of energy from oil that would otherwise have been burned. So whatever the externalized costs of drilling, refining, and shipping a barrel of oil are, it's about a five-thousandth of that. If you incinerate the bottle in the end, you get that saved-up energy back, at the risk of producing pollution from other things in the furnace.
Of course, blow-molding the bottle takes energy; you have to heat those 30 g of plastic up to 125°, but that only takes about another 4.5 kJ per bottle. Another similar amount was spent to injection-mold the preform. The actual work of blowing is even less, under 0.1 kJ. Similarly for shipping, molding machine operation, machine maintenance, catalysts, and so on.
(A potential hole in this analysis is that I don't really know the energy costs of the whole terephthalic acid synthesis and polymerization process. They can't be enormously higher than the cost of molding, but they might be a lot lower or a little higher.)
Contrast that with washing a glass bottle. You can't really wash a 500-mℓ glass bottle with less than about a liter of water, and to sterilize it you need that water to be at least 60°, preferably more like 90°. Heating water from 25° to 60° takes 35 calories per gram; at 4.2 J/cal, that's 150 kJ.
(I think in actual fact the energy to reuse a glass bottle is about an order of magnitude higher than this.)
You also have to take into account the energy to make the glass bottle: you're heating 500 grams of raw materials (or maybe cullet) up past, typically, 1200°, which takes maybe 700 kJ, depending on the materials' specific heats and enthalpies of fusion. This gets amortized over the number of reuses of the bottle.
What about disposal? Proper disposal of a 500-gram glass bottle uses 15 times as much landfill space as a 30-gram plastic bottle (just as it costs 15 times as much to ship) but in any case there is no shortage of landfill space, and neither type of bottle occupies an appreciable percentage of existing landfills. Improper disposal for glass bottles is much worse, as you know if you've ever stepped on a broken glass bottle underwater at the beach. Chemically, both materials are very inert and nontoxic. (Microplastics are almost entirely from washing synthetic fibers, not from plastic bottles.)
So, making a plastic bottle takes on the order of 10 kJ of energy, while washing a glass bottle for reuse takes more like 150 kJ, and similarly shipping glass around externalizes 15× as much of each cost. Neither one has significant disposal externalities, except in the rare case of improper disposal, in which case broken glass is dangerous.
The crucial question, then, is how you weight the raw-material extraction externalities for the plastic bottle, and whether you incinerate it; because if drilling, refining, and shipping oil is the most significant externality (oil spills, bribing Nigerian officials, arresting Native American protestors asserting a sovereign right to block the Keystone pipeline, US invasions of Iraq), then the plastic bottle is about 7× worse. Unless you incinerate it instead of burying it in a landfill, in which case suddenly its oil consumption drops to zero, making it much better again. On the other hand, if the most significant externality is something related to burning oil or other fuels, like global warming, washing the glass bottle is 15× worse than throwing it out and replacing it with a plastic bottle. Unless your hot-water heater is solar or geothermal. Then again, you can run a blow-molding plant on solar energy, too.
(There are other questions of pollution; both glassmaking and PET-making can produce pollution, but it's not intrinsic to either process, so which process produces more pollution is largely a matter of how mismanaged it is. However, by virtue of dealing with 15× larger quantities of material, glassmaking is at a disadvantage here.)
> You can't really wash a 500-mℓ glass bottle with less than about a liter of water, and to sterilize it you need that water to be at least 60°, preferably more like 90°. Heating water from 25° to 60° takes 35 calories per gram; at 4.2 J/cal, that's 150 kJ.
A tiny nitpick. I'm quite sure you can use that same liter of hot water to wash multiple bottles. And even then any facility that washes bottles at scale would use the leftover heat from waste water to heat the fresh water.
I think you're right—and, unless you wash the bottle by hand before sending it to the recycling center, that's not a "tiny nitpick," it demolishes my whole thesis. But maybe the "thesis" was already so full of caveats as to be fairly demolished in the first place, unless you reduce it to "it depends".
Recycling waste water is a whole science, this goes for car washes, dishwashers (which now use less water than doing the same thing by hand) and industrial washing of all kinds of materials. The times when water was used just once are long gone, and that's before we get into thermal recycling to ensure that the maximum amount of energy is extracted from whatever waste remains.
I really enjoyed the analysis (as another commenter mentioned).
One quibble: > Proper disposal of a 500-gram glass bottle uses 15 times as much landfill space as a 30-gram plastic bottle (just as it costs 15 times as much to ship)
It only costs 15x as much to ship if weight is the driving factor in shipping. For a lot of surface shipping methods, dimensional measures govern the shipping prices either entirely or substantially. (No one is flying empty bottles as part of their supply chain.) It might be 2x as much, but it’s not going to be 15x if both pallets of bottles take up the same space.
You're right about that, although for the same reason plastic bottles are usually blow-molded from preforms in or near the bottling plant, to avoid shipping bulky empty bottles around.
Also glass is denser than PET, so 15 times as much mass is really only like 6 times as much volume in the landfill.
Only at the beach, unless by "a short time" you mean centuries to millennia. In any other context (in the forest, by the side of the highway, in a river, in the desert, buried in your backyard) the glass can remain dangerously sharp for at least millennia and in some cases billions of years.
Of course there are natural sharp rocks, too, just like there's natural asbestos and natural hydrogen sulfide.
If that is the case, then sure, do so. But no effort is being made. And in the case of disposables, they can be made to have less impact on the environment, in both production and decomposition stages.
>Fifty years ago, soda was generally sold in returnable glass bottles
It still is in India (at least sometimes).
I suspect rising labour costs killed this industry, though. Why take on a logistical challenge you don't have to?
In Japan, consumers are responsible for disassembling their waste when recycling. Something like that could work for the USA, though I'm not sure if Japan's more involved system actually gets better results than other countries. For example, https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry.... indicates that much of the recycling is oriented around energy production than actual material reuse.
Obviously we should expect energy/material loss when recycling (meaning, each time something is recycled it should require inputs), but perhaps we can get those numbers down more and more as time goes on.
If something isn't obviously recyclable (like, pure aluminum, pure glass, or regular paper) I throw it into the trash. I'd rather it end up in a landfill here, where there is at least a pretense of environmental regulation, than have it shipped overseas after being rejected from a recycling process.
I also watched that video, it's just so depressing. The amount of externalized costs we incur is simply staggering.
When I see someone throw something away, or when I throw something away myself, I just think: "Everything you've ever thrown away is somewhere."
One way could be to tax based on recyclability. There's a lot of ways to implement this, but packaging that's 100% plain cardboard should be cheaper than something made of plastics, and anything where two different materials are glued together should just be stupidly expensive. That squishy (non-recyclable) foam glued to the inside of cardboard boxes is really frustrating.
The recycling process for a pringles can sounds somewhat simple conceptually.
Coarse shred
(duration???) Submerge within an artificial swamp rich in bacteria to digest the biological components; ideally capture the outputs from this loop for fuel or other bio processes.
When completed a rich 'ore' of mixed metal shavings should be the result, and easier to recycle.
First off, you don't have a custom process for every random bit of packaging out there, even those that occur as frequently as pringles cans. Second, even if you did, you'd have a massive sorting problem on your hand and those custom lines to deal with each and every products packaging would require an awful lot of space, energy and other resources to cope with.
So as nice as this idea sounds it is not really workable in practice.
The way it does work is indeed, shredding, then float tanks to separate the lighter materials from the heavier ones, then some more stepwise improvements (for instance: to separate out the steel from other metals) and finally compaction and what comes out the other end gets passed on to companies willing to pay for it, and if there is no market, which get paid to deal with the resulting sludge/scraps/goo.
Recycling is not nearly as orderly a process as manufacturing is, and there will always be a residue that simply can not be dealt with economically. Properly designed packaging takes that into account at the time of manufacture to ensure that the residue is as small a fraction as possible.
This is a hard problem, and in the longer term, next to climate change one of the hardest ones that we will need to tackle. The good news is that we could start today.
The resulting sludge is in many cases much richer in valuable (but dangerous) heavy metals than the ores we mine the heavy metals from, as well as a few lighter elements like lithium. Maybe the way to handle this is to split it up into one-tonne or ten-tonne chunks, seal each one in a few millimeters of polypropylene, and bury them in carefully recorded secret locations: in abandoned underground mines, quarries, wilderness areas, on the sea floor. Then, you can sell the coordinates of these secret locations to would-be miners—maybe not in 02021 but in 02061 or 02121. Seeking investors with long time horizons!
More realistically, there isn't really any risk of running out of landfill space for product packaging at anything similar to current consumption levels. If a person ate a 50-gram can of Pringles and a 30-gram bottle of Coke every day, they'd have 29 kg of packaging at the end of the year, or 29 liters, which compact down to a 40-cm-diameter sphere.
I used to periodically visit an ecovillage that handled their (much smaller than normal) packaging waste in this way: they would tamp it into two-liter Coke bottles with a piece of rebar as a tamper, and when the bottle was full, they would cap it, plaster it over with adobe, and use it as a construction brick. A 6 m × 18 m house with 300-mm-thick walls 3 m tall contains 43 m³ of wall volume which can be mostly filled with this kind of stuff: 150 person-junk-food-years of packaging.
8 billion people doing this would produce 23 million cubic meters of packaging per year, which sounds like a lot, but it's an 800-meter-diameter sphere. Lake Superior is 12000000 million cubic meters, so it would take those 8 billion people half a million years to fill it up with this packaging, if carefully weighted to keep it from floating, of course.
So, I don't think recycling packaging is a particularly bad problem. If by "in the longer term" you mean over the next hundred million years, I do agree that we'll need to solve it. But I don't think it's a particularly difficult problem at that timescale. For the next few million years, we have plenty of space to just store the stuff until recycling it is profitable.
It is indeed a hard problem. It's also why manufacturers are the only ones who can realistically deal with the problem. Let the Pringles company collect all the used Pringles cans from the same supermarkets they deliver Pringles to. They have the scale to justify building a dedicated facility for recycling Pringles cans.
> The paper companies don't want the cans because they don't want to somehow deglue the cardboard from the aluminum (time and cost expensive to process), and ditto for the aluminum people.
I'd have expected that simply melting down the stuff would burn off all the organic contaminants (paper/plastic/glue and food residue), leaving the aluminium and sludge that can be scooped off.
Probably would still be an issue with contaminating the aluminum with carbon and possibly other impurities. You'd probably need some other process to purify the aluminum afterwards, which likely makes it too expensive.
But that process by itself is always going to be more energy efficient than winning the aluminum from bauxite ore.
Of course you need a purification step after dealing with scrap, but aluminum scrap, even when contaminated is quite valuable, basically the price is a function of how pure it already is.
You could get a lot of the way there if governments didn't sell or lease extraction rights at a bargain. And they do that for a number of reasons, but mostly because extraction and processing of natural resources is good for local economies. This is what ended up causing the "Sagebrush Rebellion" in the western United States, which is an ongoing political issue.
Yes, the Georgist solution is similar to what Norway has done with its oil resources, which have collectively made Norway immensely wealthy in comparison to the petroleum states elsewhere around the world.
The difference is whether the state will be allowed to profit from its own resources, or is the nation under the thumb of a more militarily powerful nation and there exploited by foreign capital. We let Norway exploit its resources its own way, in other nations we have interfered mightily to better our own interests at the expense of the populations of the nation that owns the oil resource.
It's not perfect, but Norway has a tax on drinks containers that is set up so that the starting point is a tax on drinks containers. However any drinks containers you recycle is offset against the tax. Then there's a government endorsed recycling scheme that handles all but the collection for you, but requires that you participate in collecting containers irrespective of whether you sold them or not.
So the default assumption is that if you do your job, the tax is more of a deposit. If you don't do your job, you, or rather your customers are still paying, and your customers can drive down the cost of your competitors by helping increase their tax offset if you make it a hassle to return things at yours.
By creating the presumption that you ought to be able to collect and recycle most of the recyclable products you sell (return rate for cans and bottles is well over 90%), the tax/deposit can be set fairly high. High enough and you create secondary businesses taking the hassle of returns for those who can't be bothered (don't want to return your bottle in Norway? odds are someone who needs the money will fish it out of the trash to collect the deposit), and there's a strong incentive for businesses to take back anything they sell subject to such taxes/deposits and deliver them to whichever scheme is approved to offset against their tax bill.
This sounds relatively close in principle to an implementation of what you're suggesting. with penalties etc. implemented basically by tallying up the tax per unit sold and then reducing the liability per unit recycled, so the penalty is simply the default if you fail to recycle.
Handful of states and territories in Australia are doing this, and while I like the idea I haven't found a single person who has returned their bottles (including myself), instead just absorbed the additional cost into their expenses.
The cost needs to be high enough to either get really high return rates and/or to cover the costs to society of undoing whatever damage is done by what is left.
Note that a key part is also that the most convenient option offered to comply needs to be to participate in recycling.
In Norway you hand bottles or cans in pretty much anywhere that sells them. Which means most people just bring them in next time they go to the grocery store.
If you require people to bring them to special recycling locations you should expect return rates to plummet.
What _is_ the true price of a resource though? You have to ration it out for a certain length of time, but what is the end date? Do we ensure we have supply for 100 years? 1000?
I'm not trying to shit on the idea because I think we genuinely need to do something but I can't come up with any rational way to calculate the true cost of limited resources.
I think that's the real question. How much does it cost to add a bunch of packaging that serves no purpose other than to sell the item? I have no idea.
At the same, I don't think doing nothing at all a good alternative. If anything I don't even think this is the biggest obstacle. That's probably the fact that literally no country in the world wants to volunteer to put themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
> I think that's the real question. How much does it cost to add a bunch of packaging that serves no purpose other than to sell the item? I have no idea.
I think that it has been established that the cost of packaging is smaller than the marginal increase in profits from greater sales (from the perspective of the manufacturers and retailers).
In theory, an AR-heavy economy could displace packaging costs with AR facsimiles overlaid on generic (even standardized) packaging, but I don't think that would be a win, energy-wise.
No resource is truly finite except for energy, so there are upper bounds for the cost of "finite" resources. Pretty much all things that we dig out of the ground don't leave the planet when we're done with them, they just get diluted. So the cost of throwing it away is upper bounded by the cost of extracting the material from a dilute source, e.g. the ocean. That's usually prohibitively expensive.
Like if you buy natural gas from a responsibly run source that does a good job and has low emissions and I buy it from some terrible company that does a shite job, do we pay the same tax per unit of gas consumed?
One mechanism is to design the tax to be revenue-neutral for the average taxpayer.
For example, with carbon taxes on gasoline, we can calculate what the average person consumes in terms of gasoline per year, and then calculate the outliers (people with super-efficient cars and people with gas guzzlers). Then, we establish some reasonable maximum that we think we can get away with surcharging the guzzlers, and establish a gradient. The average person is given back a tax break that corresponds to the surcharge they'll pay at the pump, so it's a wash for them; the guzzler gets the tax break too but ends up paying more, incentivizing everyone to be the efficient driver who basically gets a bonus.
I think you could do the same for any kind of tax; establish the baseline for resource consumption efficiency for a particular recyclable commodity (and it will have to be per-commodity to make any sense at all); set up the incentive gradient so that companies producing more-recyclable-than-average goods end up getting free cash for doing so, hopefully offsetting the other costs associated with this, and companies producing things that are harder or impossible to recycle end up paying more.
The end result is that the product for the consumer that is more recyclable should end up making more financial sense. Instead of pinning the gradient the way you do for gas (literally, 'what they can get away with and still get elected'), you'd pin it at a level where it incentivizes companies themselves to be purchasing recycled materials instead of new ones.
All of the above is predicated on the material in question being able to be recycled without requiring more energy input / producing a higher carbon footprint to recycle than acquiring the original raw product is. There are some materials that it's just not worth to recycle, most of the time; plastic is definitely on that side for now, like it or not.
Adding to this, we should view raw materials used in production as something we "borrow" from the earth that must be returned. And the cost of returning them - through disassembly and recycling - should be reflected in the price of the final product.
Right-to-repair friendly products would thus get an immediate advantage owing to their ease of disassembly.
In economics we talk about externalities, or costs tht are burdened by society but not the producer, making prices artificially low.
I would love to see some mechanism in place to make sure that firms bare the cost of externalities. In this case, maybe firms are required to fund the cost of recycling their products which would incentive them to reduce the cost of recycling.
Yes the cost of products will go up, but in a direct relationship to removing the cost to society and making sure products are properly priced.
I'm purposefully simplifying this because the actual methodology to make this happen is incredibly complicated.
If someone told me all this $3T extra spending in the US was to offset the costs of producing a more Circular Economy then I'd agree it would be a future generation's money well spent for good reasons.
I don't see why it would be at all like plastic recycling: plastic "recycling" was never practical because there are too many kinds of plastic and making new plastic is so much cheaper. When the Chinese were buying it they were landfilling most of it in exchange for payments to take it off of our hands. On the other hand, aluminum recycling works very well.
I'm slightly surprised by landfilling plastic. I hear it's pretty high calorie, up to the point of being energy-positive to burn it with filtering out the fumes. Is it just not enough to make this money-positive when accounting for handling?
Dioxins were become problem in 90s so smaller incinerator is banned and now incinerators must run on high temperature (> 800C) for not to emit dioxins. Emissions are also must be measured.
IIRC it's not "recycling" at all - they'd just bury the plastic in China instead of here. Much like we've "reduced emissions" by moving all industrial production to China which is almost completely un-regulated in terms of emissions until 2030. It's as though people think that atmospheric emissions are somehow confined to the country which emits them, rather than affect the entire planet.
We could also stop soldering batteries to things. It's a lot easier to recycle a battery that can be easily removed than one which is permanently attached to a circuit board.
The majority of Lithium-Ion batteries are spot welded rather than soldered (soldering injects a lot of heat), which makes recycling battery packs a rather time consuming and annoying job. The best is probably to grind them up and then to create a sludge and do a sort by centrifuge or some other bulk method of processing the materials.
A typical Lithium-Ion cell contains Aluminum, steel, possibly a protection circuit (fibreglass, electronics components), carbon, copper, an electrolyte with lithium in solution and quite probably other elements besides.
Are there places (online, or else), journals, channels about a more recycling minded society ? both at the average joe but also at the industrial/technological level ?
I believe that the auto industry had an aim for “green manufacturing” by 2000. The idea was to build cars such that a car could be taken apart as easily as it was put together on the assembly line (no crushing or inceneration, in other words), this would enable easy recapturing of recyclable components. But apparently this was more a pipe dream than reality as far as I can tell.
Seems like cars are much less reparable than those from the 80s which are then worse than 60s. Electronics are part of this, but so is making cars lighter, more integrated, more fuel efficient. Old cars it is e.g much easier to do a tranny rebuild, new ones they are too damn sensitive and its much harder, and this extends to doing basically any repair. If larger laptops that are easier to repair are good for consumers you'd think so would cars like that, but no, fuel efficiency must trump all.
There are car mfgs where you have to maintain pretty strict voltages as you reprogram modules else they will brick themselves. They want to prevent Garage Joe or Jane from fixing his or her own car and instead have them go to the dealership and prevents owners from using used parts -so less "green".
> "The immediate benefit of switching from a liquid to solid electrolyte is that the energy density of the battery can increase. This is because instead of requiring large separators between the liquid cells, solid state batteries only require very thin barriers to prevent a short circuit."
> The team tested batteries with recycled NMC111 cathodes, the most common flavor of cathode containing a third each of nickel, manganese, and cobalt. The cathodes were made using a patented recycling technique that Battery Resources, a startup Wang co-founded, is now commercializing.
That seems like a waste of cobalt. I think modern cells are usually something more like NMC811 (80% nickel, 10% each of manganese and cobalt). You could use the cobalt from the old cells to make more than three times as many new cells, though you'd need a lot more nickel.
I'm hoping most mass-market EVs switch over to using lithium iron phosphate, which doesn't use nickel or cobalt. Supposedly there are some major LFP patents expiring soon; maybe that'll increase the number of factories outside of China producing them.
LiFePO4 also has lower energy density, and non Tesla EV makers seem to be making really inefficient EVs (less than 3 miles per kWh in the new Volvo and BMW!) and just putting in a huge battery pack to "compensate". Which the buyer gets the privilege to pay for with up front cost, charging time, and less range than they ought to have.
I am impressed so far with my new-to-me Chevy Bolt getting 4.5 mi/kWh and squeezing a respectable range (250 mi) out of a smallish battery (55 kWh).
But when BMW puts in an 88 kWh battery in their i4 but it only gets 2.3 mi/kWh, there's no way they could accept the lower power density of lithium iron phosphate batteries.
LFP has lower energy density, but it's still good enough to be usable, and the technology keeps getting better. I think recently-made LFP cells tend to be somewhere around 150 wh/kg, which is equivalent to older-generation regular lithium-ion cells. Tesla has been using LFPs in some of their model 3s; I'm not sure if that's just their China-market version or if that's worldwide.
I think LFP is a good option for getting mass-produced EVs to the point where they're approximately cost-competitive with gas-powered cars. Energy density isn't amazing, but the materials they're made from are cheaper and more readily available, they're easier to recycle, they can last a very long time, and they're quite a bit safer.
I expect regular lithium ion will continue to be used in high-end vehicles until some battery technology comes along that's better and cheaper, or cobalt and nickel get so expensive that it's not worth the cost.
That's interesting that the BMW is that much less efficient than a Chevy Bolt. I wonder if that's due to aerodynamics, weight, drivetrain efficiency, or something else?
I think my point still stands about non-Tesla automakers, who seem disinclined to optimize their vehicles for range. Tesla, with better aerodynamics and more efficient drivetrains, are well positioned to use LFP batteries. Combine that with their expertise in building safe, efficient battery packs, and they’ll be even further ahead of everyone else.
Living in a relatively cold climate (average January temperature in Boston, MA, USA is 22F [-6C]), I am a bit concerned about the reportedly worse cold performance of the batteries, but presumably they’ll manage that. One of their top markets is Norway after all.
Now if only they would just put some damn knobs in the car instead of that giant touchscreen…
I don't see anyone calling BS on this, so I will point out the conflict of interest. This is a startup claiming their solution is better than anything you've seen before using in-house 'research'.
FTA:
A new study by Wang... The cathodes were made using a patented recycling technique that Battery Resourcers, a startup Wang co-founded, is now commercializing.
We should put a deposit on all batteries. I will admit I am guilty of taking my dead batteries and just throwing them out vs recycling them. We should incentivize the recycling of all batteries.
Please don't do this with batteries, they are not only toxic but can also be a fire hazard if not disposed of properly, this goes especially for Lithium-Ion based batteries.
I'm scrupulous about extracting batteries from my electronics for proper disposal, personally... But realistically, without a cash incentive to get people to pull out the screwdriver, many folks won't do it and they'll end up in the garbage.
This needs to be a deposit-based program. E-recycle fee upfront at purchase, rebate at proper disposal.
Where I live such waste is collected separately (small chemical waste), you get a little box for it and you can drop it off for free at the local garbage disposal/sorting facility.
Similar here, but my point is that many won't do the hassle of extracting a screwed-in battery from an electronic device rather than throwing it straight into the opaque trash-bag. A fee-and-rebate program would provide a cash incentive to properly sort your batteries out of trash. It works for refillable liquor bottles.
Ours is collected locally, you just leave a bag of your batteries on top of the bin and it gets collected at the same time as the recycling. They will take small electrical items as well.
On top of that all supermarkets in the UK have a battery return box where you can drop them off.
A promising sign, but the GP's points are a reason to be skeptical until we see evidence of scale up. There could be issues or limitations that are not obvious to non-experts. That is the case with almost every news story like this.
Everything can be recycled with sufficient low cost energy. If we had 100x the available energy at 1/100 the cost, things that seem crazy become possible. E.g. deconstruction of an iPhone into piles of constituent elements.
I just bought a Gen 1 Chevy Volt battery pack segment to use for DIY farm tools projects here. 8 years old still has 89% of capacity, a convenient form factor, convenient 48V, high current (dangerously so!), 2 kWh, and easily purchased from a local supplier.
There is a lot of potential for re-use of battery packs, it will just take some time for the 3rd party industry to develop around it. Lots of use for these things for solar projects, especially.
My point being that actual chemical level recycling is really last resort.
We talk about recycling, I'm concerned that it's the same chatter as we had from the plastic companies in the 80-90s who invented the reduce reuse recycle slogan so that they could get away with selling more plastic, when its much cheaper to produce new plastic than recycle.
So the question is, is it cheaper to produced new batteries or recycle old ones?
I feel lithium is a transition material, until we have more sustainable battery tech.
I always thought EVs are more environmentally friendly and that batteries would be recycled but from what I have read that is not really the case. It seems that batteries are a similar scam like plastic recycling where industry put out a lot of propaganda to make people believe that things would be recycled. But in reality only a very small percentage gets recycled.
Probably depends on the facility. Tesla recycles 100% of used batteries it receives, presumably by redeploying good cells as stationary storage and recycling the ones that are too far gone. At the Nevada plant in 2020, every 1000kWh of unusable batteries yielded materials to produce 921kWh of new cells.[0]
With that said, many Teslas that are totaled have their batteries sold on the secondary market for classic car EV conversions and DIY home energy storage.
Your initial thoughts are correct but there just aren’t enough lithium ion battery waste yet to make it very profitable. Once more and more EVs start getting end of life it will become very profitable. Keep in mind that the cars currently going to landfill were made 10 or more years ago. There were very very few lithium ion batteries in cars 10+ years ago.
What about reuse of batteries for grid storage? Weight/capacity ratio doesn't matter for something sitting on the ground. I presume that with economics of solar you could use even almost-dead batteries profitably.
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EVs are still better than ICE cars, so don't take any EV problems as an excuse to keep producing ICE cars. E.g. even if the grid was entirely oil-powered, large plants burn oil more efficiently and cleanly than ICE, and keep emissions away from cities.
But cars as a form factor are still inherently inefficient for moving people. It doesn't matter if they're electric, taxis, or self-driving: compared to trains they have low road throughput, depend on tires with much higher rolling resistance, and particles from tire wear are another source of pollution.
This is about recycled "*NMC111 Cathode*", not recycled whole-batteries. Although cathode is expensive, lithium is the tough business that requires a new solution.
Does the lithium, cobalt, etc. not undergo a material change as the battery is used? Meaning, is the lithium in a brand new battery the same as the lithium in a battery that's been used for years?
I would presume the question was about the physical and chemical state of the lithium rather than the atomic makeup. Like whether the lithium is ionized, whether it's a powder or crystallized solid, etc.
Both chemically combine with other atoms to form molecules - that is how a battery works. If they combine with the wrong thing it can be a lot harder to separate them again (not nuclear level, but harder)
The stoichiometry stays exactly the same, just shred the battery and feed the result back to the beginning of the e.g cobalt mining operation operation. Better however if you somehow manage to roughly separate it into lithium, cobalt and so on and use the result instead of the respective ore.
These recycled batteries are just as good as new ones says new study written by person who makes and sells them. Is it really a study if its by the seller? Isn't it more of a brochure?
Exciting news but there are a lot of missing details. The differentiation seems to be that they can output ready to use cathode material (NMC) instead of raw elements, and that those materials may perform as good or better than new materials. I’m curious what this process takes in terms of energy and inputs like acid. And what about the rest of the battery? And then there are the policy and cost questions to make it all economically viable compared to new material.
Isn't most recycling just breaking down batteries to their elemental state? That would imply there couldn't possible be a difference between new and recycled.
In many recycling processes it's typical that there are pollutants that are not cost effective to remove. You can apply metallurgical techniques to reclaim the metals from a battery, so I don't see how this would apply, but not everyone knows that.
Intuitively I agree, from a different angle although I don't know about chemistry either, but from a supply chain perspective, for generations it's all been about optimising delivery to a consumer. Supply lines point directly at households and beyond that point it's a bit of a dark web. Random piles of crap end up... somewhere?
If the consumer became a supplier of raw recyclable materials, and those materials had value, they deserve to be compensated, and will probably be more engaged in the sorting and quality control processes. I drink a lot of beer - that makes me a great supplier of ready-made glass bottles to anyone that wants them. Rather than bulk collecting a random pile of potentially recyclable material, here's a bunch of sorted glass bottles each quarter. Anyone that can hook into that kind of idea and find some kind of economy of scale might make a killing.
This concept exists in the American auto repair sector as core charges. I believe they work pretty well, but once the "core charge" becomes too insignificant then people will ignore it for the convenience. I suspect an organization as large as Apple could subsidize core charges for iPhone and laptop batteries.
I remember selling bulk quantities of beer bottles back to the shop as recently as 2005. A state-mandated, industry-wide reuse scheme would lead to them being examined for damage, sterilised and supplied back to breweries. Theoretically the scheme still works, but somehow the beers I buy when visiting the home country all come in bottles not partaking in it.
I call this entropy. Once the products are dispersed it takes a lot of energy to bring them back together like they were in the supply chain. I'm not sure it will ever be solved purely because of the physics.
There could different pollutants when you recycle batteries than when you take ore.
I am sure there would be ways to do this but I guess somebody has to invest the money to figure out the process. And also to design things so they can be recycled easily.
Metals are really easy to reclaim and the energy required to separate nearly pure metal from some minor contaminants is a lot lower than separating it from ore.
If anything, recycling batteries is one of the most obviously beneficial things to do. Works for lead, and recycling aluminum cans was also cost effective (when you get rid of the cost of collecting the cans). Glass is also cost effective.
In 2031, it should be possible to by a long-past-warranty 2021 EV, replace the battery pack (with one made from recycled EV batteries!), and have it just-work. Just like you can replace the engine of a classic car today if you are so inclined.
It should be possible because the electrical connection of the batteries to EV drivetrains are relatively simple - although I'm sure that will take a lawsuit (like was launched against Nespresso to allow 3rd party coffee pods) for EV manufacturers to release the specs required for this to happen.
It would be unfortunate if EV batteries were non-serviceable except by the manufacturer after they were out of warranty, like phones are today. Instead, battery replacement would potentially allow the tertiary used EV market to flourish, and make them more accessible to people of modest means.