Chasing Black Mass: Inside the Electric Vehicle Battery Recycling Process

The technology and infrastructure for recycling electric vehicle batteries has advanced rapidly in the last decade, with new businesses emerging to help prevent a future where end-of-life electric vehicle batteries end up in landfills, seeping green pinch into the soil and releasing toxic fumes into the earth. air

A closed-loop cycle is already happening at high volumes for brands like BMW, Mercedes, Honda, Jaguar and Land Rover, thanks to companies armed with a slew of patents and tens of millions of dollars in federal funding.(Opens in a new window).

For an electric vehicle to qualify for the full $7,500 federal tax credit in 2023, 40% of the key minerals in its battery must be mined or recycled in North America. “The political focus on this has been really interesting,” Ajay Kochhar, CEO of battery recycler Li-Cycle, tells PCMag. “Four years ago people were saying, ‘battery recycling, what is that?’ But now it’s mainstream.”

The minerals selected within the batteries (mainly cobalt, lithium, manganese and nickel) are expensive, limited and largely purchased from foreign companies. Recycling can reduce the cost of the battery (and the vehicle itself), shorten the supply chain and create domestic jobs while reducing the need to extract more from the earth; a rare example of business meets environmentalism that means electric vehicle recycling is likely here. to stay.

To see how the process works, PCMag spoke with Kochhar and Mike O’Kronley, CEO of Ascend Elements.(Opens in a new window)another major US battery recycler.

Reusing car parts and batteries is nothing new

(Credit: mustafabilgesatkin/Getty Images)

As unique as the electric vehicle recycling business is, repurposing auto parts is far from a new idea. The bodies of most vehicles on the road today use a high percentage of recycled steel from seized vehicles.

“All cars are essentially crushed and ground and then all that steel is recycled and goes right back into new cars,” says Ascend Element’s O’Kronley. “This industry is already there. And so what needs to be developed is the recycling of metals from lithium-ion batteries. [to] put them back into the supply chain. That’s what we’re doing.”

(Credits: Andrey Mitrofanov/Getty Images)

Only about 20-30% of consumer electronics, from phones to laptops, are recycled “since it’s up to the consumer to hand them in,” says Li-Cycle’s Kochhar. “For EV batteries, I think we can get to 80-90% recycling pretty quickly. It’s more B2B for cars to get more easily into established recycling channels.”

The highly valuable minerals inside electric vehicle batteries are also “infinitely recyclable,” says O’Kronley. Their performance does not degrade over time because they are basic elements, straight from the periodic table in chemistry class: Li, Co, Ni, Mn. The recycling process recovers them in a powdered form known as “black pulp,” then rejuvenates it like fluffing a pillow.

Recognizing the opportunity to recover and resell these minerals, Ascend Elements opened a store in 2015, followed by Li-Cycle in 2016. Another big one, Redwood Materials(Opens in a new window), opened in 2017, headed by a Tesla co-founder. These three companies, just some of many(Opens in a new window)—operate nearly a dozen facilities together, mostly in the US.

Invention of new methods of recycling electric vehicle batteries

(Credits: The Washington Post / Contributor / Getty Images)

These facilities support batteries from multiple sources: end-of-life vehicles, battery recalls, old energy storage products and manufacturing scrap.

“If you walk into our warehouse today, it’s like a sea of ​​batteries,” says Kochhar. “We’re about 50% full electric vehicle battery packs, 25% energy storage batteries, and then consumer electronics and manufacturing scrap, which is growing fast.”

Ascend Elements’ largest source of raw material is scrap manufacturing. “It’s like when you’re baking cookies, there’s too much left over outside of the cookie cutter that you ideally don’t want to throw away,” says O’Kronley. “You want to reuse it.”

To facilitate scrap collection, both companies have facilities near major car manufacturers. Li-Cycle has a plant in Alabama near a Mercedes-Benz factory and another near Volkswagen in Ontario, Canada. The Ascend Elements facility in Kentucky is located near a large Ford battery manufacturing plant.

Left: Dhiren Mistry, battery materials engineer at Ascend Elements, tests an aqueous solution containing elements recovered from the battery. Right: CEO Mike O’Kronley speaks at the opening of the Covington, GA facility. (Credit: Ascend Elements)

“We take the batteries and put them in a really big shredder,” O’Kronley says of Ascend Elements’ process. “It’s ground up into tiny little pieces and goes through a screen, like a sieve, so anything that’s really small or powdery falls to the bottom.”

Larger parts such as aluminum, copper, plastic and steel are separated. “We recycle everything from the package,” he says.

However, the black mass remains the central focus of the process. Both companies hold multiple patents on processes to recover and prepare the black mass for use in a new battery. “Ninety-five percent or more of the materials you put in are recyclable, but 10-15 percent of the battery’s mass is by far the most valuable,” says Kochhar.

This most valuable part comes from the cathode. All batteries have two main components: the cathode and the anode. Energy flows between them to generate power. The anode is composed entirely of low-cost graphite, but the cathode is where the money is: it contains cobalt, lithium, manganese and nickel.

Ascend Elements opened last month(Opens in a new window) a new plant in Georgia, one of the largest in North America. It can process up to 70,000 EV batteries a year while reducing “the carbon footprint of new EV battery cathode materials by up to 90%,” Ascend Elements says.

Later this year, Li-Cycle will open its largest facility in Rochester, New York. The 65-acre site is currently under construction, but “will be capable of processing 35,000 tons of black stock annually, with battery materials equivalent to approximately 225,000 electric vehicles,” Li-Cycle says.(Opens in a new window).

‘Not all recycling is created equal’: less sustainable versions

Some methods of extracting black mass from an old battery are less environmentally friendly. “Not all recycling is created equal, and there are many steps in pre-processing and post-processing,” says Kochhar.

Following a lead from other recycling industries, some recyclers put electric vehicle batteries in a large furnace to burn off the outer shell and leave the remaining black mass. This energy-intensive process “leaves you with some pretty nasty air emissions that can be carcinogenic,” says Kochhar.

Neither Ascend Elements nor Li-Cycle use heat in their process. Redwood Materials still does, at least in part, but regardless, there’s still room for it in a growing industry with more work to do than facilities to do it.

“We’re fans of Redwood, we’re fans of Li-Cycle, because the problem we’re facing is so big that no one company is going to solve it,” says Thomas Frey, senior director of marketing and communications at Ascend Elements. “So just like we need multiple battery manufacturers and multiple car companies, we need multiple battery recycling companies. Right now we don’t have the facilities in the U.S. to refine and create all the materials we need.”

It is difficult to calculate the total number of electric vehicle batteries that are recycled, as the process happens behind closed doors between private companies. Also, some automakers like to keep their EV recycling activities under wraps, Frey says. For them, it’s like a trade secret; a supply chain hack.