 Good afternoon. Welcome to this webinar on the sustainable recycling of critical materials and lithium ion batteries. My name is Ayanna Lynch and I am a research assistant with the Chemical Sciences Roundtable at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The Roundtable provides a neutral forum to advance the understanding of issues of importance to chemical sciences and engineering and promotes the exchange of information among government, industry, and academic sectors. This is the first webinar of 2023 and a series of webinars on emerging topics. We launched our series of webinars in early 2020 and all the presentations can be found on the CSR website. Today we will provide an overview of the process of battery recycling, discuss the critical material needs to improve the recycling strategy, and present innovative research in the industry. The format will consist of three presentations. There will be time for one or two clarifying questions after each presentation, but all their questions will be addressed in our discussion time after the presentations conclude. Dr. Mark Jones and Dr. Ian Rowe will be our moderators for this webinar. In addition to being members of the Chemical Sciences Roundtable, Dr. Jones is an independent consultant at MJPHD LLC with over 30 years of experience at Dow Chemical Company. Dr. Rowe is a technology manager with the U.S. Department of Energy's Bioenergy Technologies Office within the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. They will be asking the questions on behalf of the audience during the discussion time. Questions can be submitted via the Q&A button on Zoom located in the bottom control panel. Note that the chat feature has been disabled on Zoom for audience members. Finally, I would like to invite everyone to our upcoming events, including a webinar on chemistry and synthetic food, and a webinar and workshop series on publications in the future. The workshop will be held both online and in person at the National Academy of Sciences Building in Washington, D.C. To find out more about our upcoming events, please see the CSR website. With that, I would like to introduce our first speaker, Mr. Hans Eric Mellon. Mr. Mellon is the Managing Director at Circular Energy Storage, a London-based consultancy focusing on life cycle management for lithium ion batteries. He founded Circular Energy Storage in 2017, leveraging his experience in the battery recycling industry and from advising companies and governments in circular economy, eco design, and energy policy. He is a widely quoted expert on battery recycling. With that, I will hand it over to Mr. Mellon. Yeah, thank you very much. I hope everybody hear me well. And I will start to share my screen. That works. All right. Yeah, thank you, everybody, for inviting me and to cover this very important topic. I will give an introduction about recycling of lithium ion batteries. And awkwardly, I might talk a lot about not which is recycling or not about recycling per se. And I will explain why. We hear a lot about that recycling of lithium ion batteries is not happening. We hear about that only 5% of lithium ion batteries being recycled. That is a number that is very often used in the US. But we hear other stories as well about like 3% in Australia that only 1% of lithium is being recovered. None of those numbers are true. They have never been true. And it's quite easy to really go down and check the references where these are coming from. Lithium ion batteries have basically always been recycled, not always as efficiently as it could be, but they've always been recycled. And I will give you a little bit of context of where recycling comes in into the lithium ion battery industry. And why they might be that we haven't recycled that much batteries and why we haven't recycled so much in the US or in Canada or in Europe. But we have recycled much more elsewhere. I guess everybody or most people know about the lithium ion battery which is a very important invention. I mean it's not the first rechargeable battery. We have been having everything from red acid, nickel cadmium, nickel metal hybrid batteries before. But lithium ion battery with its energy density, but also in many ways versatility has been a very important innovation for a lot of or enabler of a lot of different kind of devices and equipment. In this picture you basically see the most important component which is really interesting and important when we talk about recycling. Basically we have three different kind of batteries which you see from left to right here. We have cylindrical batteries which can look like basically a small AA batteries a little bit usually bigger than a AA battery. And we have prismatic which you actually don't really see in this picture. But basically there are like square batteries that can be stacked together in any way. And then we have what we call pouch cells which basically are like aluminum bags with actual materials inside. You can also see that we have the cathode which is an aluminum current collector which is covered with the cathode material and which is usually what we are really interested in in the recycling sector. That's why you would where you would find the lithium, nickel and manganese and cobalt and a little bit depending on what kind of cathode we are talking about. And you have the anode which is a current collector made by copper and where you have graphite covered. And the battery works like we have lithium ions that are traveling to and from the cathode to the anode. And the lithium is first part of the cathode and then it goes back and forth. What we what was really interesting when we look at this market is how phenomenally it has been growing. If I would take this chart and I would take it only to 2010 it would in fact almost look like this. I mean we just don't see the growth in the early years right now only because it has been growing so much the last decade. And what you can see is here that what everything started really with portable electronics like the first was a webcam or a camcorder. And then we it was really the mobile phones and laptops and later tablets and other different kind of electronics that were important for this market until in the beginning of last decade. That's where when we started to see batteries also made them into cars and to buses and to a variety of applications. And today we now see them in more futuristic applications such as aviation. We have them in ferries or in robots and they are really an enabler of new innovations. But you can also see in this chart that it is not that strange that we are talking so much about electric vehicles in the industry because light and heavy electric vehicles are is really what is driving this industry right now. What's also interesting when we look at this is and when we look at the future and you can see that this will only continue to grow. And again it's really on the vehicle side where we see this huge growth happening. So of course this is certainly a very important topic and recycling becomes of course important when we when we realize how much material we actually will need for this. I think if you look at the chart to the left you might also understand that recycling cannot really be a huge contributor. At least not in the right now because most of the batteries that we are using today they are in devices where they will continue to be for quite some time. And if we look at yeah yeah first of all yeah so just to finish off this and I will talk a little bit more about this but when we talk about that we were going to feed this industry with recycled materials it doesn't really make sense because we can't really feed the industry with the same devices that we are trying to build. I mean you can't really take my battery from my laptop because I still use it and in that case you will actually use that material only to make a new battery in my new laptop so it doesn't really make a lot of sense. An interesting thing we live in my batteries is also that I mean it's and then from a recycling perspective it's that they are very valuable. If you look at lead acid batteries they basically have a value of around two dollars a kilo but as you can see here the price for lithium-ion batteries is much more than that. It's also interesting to see how volatile the market has been lately and also when we talk about certain chemistry and not least about lithium-ion phosphate battery which is the cathode which do not contain cobalt or nickel. It's always described like a battery that is not worth something or worth very much and that is also why it's cheap but you can see here that it's actually worth quite a lot today and it is worth basically what an LCO battery the battery with most cobalt inside is worth more than that than what the LCO was two years ago or three years ago and nobody really complained about the prices of LCO battery by then. So then if we look at what is available for recycling yeah if you remember the last picture we showed that in 2030 we might have a market that that will put about 3.4 terawatt hour of batteries on the market a huge amount obviously and I forgot to tell you but that is based on a forecast that we basically will sell about 46 million electric vehicles that year here if we look at our forecast on what is will be available for recycling it's it's actually around 175 gigawatt hours so it's far from what we actually will place on the market by right hand and I will a little bit try to explain why is it so so much less batteries available for recycling than what we are placing on the market yeah the first obvious one is that the batteries last for a very long time they are obviously rechargeable and they last much longer than what we what we expect like the electric vehicles I mean the personal costs last for a very long time because we even if the battery is getting worse and not is always perfect or even after 10 if 15 years people can use them maybe not for the same purposes but they still can use these vehicles and also the batteries becomes much bigger which means that 50 percent of a battery 10 years ago is very different to 50 percent of a battery in today and and even more in the next year yes basically 50 percent of a battery that is placed on the market today is more than 100 percent than from an electric vehicle and placed 10 years ago another very important aspect super important in fact when we talk about recycling is that lithium-ion batteries are built in into the into the device it's essentially only batteries in power tools and maybe in cameras that you even touch yourself because otherwise it's always the professionals that of some reason are are are repairing or mounting the batteries in the in the devices that also means that the battery does not they do really have not their own life say they live the lives of the of the devices or the equipment so for instance if this equipment is traded which it is we from from the US for instance we have a huge market for for used electronics that usually will be exported to other countries and the batteries will of course follow and in fact from North America from Europe we are selling a lot of electric vehicles to other markets and of course the batteries are included in those devices as well so many of these batteries will never make it make it make it to end of life on the the US or the european market this is the main reason why we are not recycling a lot of batteries in in these countries because we don't have so much much batteries to recycle and this also shows that why we have why we keep the the electric vehicle for a long time the values are keeping up very well we believe that as we we show before that electric vehicles will remain on the boats with the batteries for about 20 years and as I said we have a lot of trading of this this does not really impact the the recycled materials or the amount of recycled materials in in the world because obviously they are just going to the market but it does have a big impact on the amount of recycled materials in in the western economies because we are we are usually not the the last the last users of the equipment we place on our markets another reason is also that batteries when they in some ways reach end of life when they are removed from the original applications they are reused and that's always obviously just like the the long lifetime a great thing and batteries are reused in so much more than normally an energy energy storage system which is something that is often referred to as second life but they are reused in the actual vehicles they can be used for upgrade and range extension we have a lot of conversion of like classic or old cars but also more professionally in fleet conversions a lot of electric vehicle batteries are used to today to power boats or to energy storage system at homes and we have a lot really going into replacement of lead acid batteries in backup systems so in in two and three wheelers which is a big market in India for instance and a lot of this reason also goes to to export so so that means that these batteries might even if they once will be recycled they in many times that they won't be recycled in the western economies and this shows this fairly well that the the reuse values of batteries say they are so much higher than the the material value so the green line here you see for a Tesla model a model less battery for instance what the materials inside and that is really before we have done anything to that battery but the the material is worth a lot as you can see on the green line but it's nothing to the actual price that many are paying for for these batteries because they want to use them even when they have been for many many years in in the vehicle and you can also see that if if this if we compare to what a recycler that will shred these batteries and produce what we call black mass which is a first step in the recycling process and that recycler we will get much much less for that battery after being doing a quite decent job on it than what the somebody that will reuse a battery is able or prepared to pay so that is usually diverting the battery from the recycling market and here you can see in in both in Europe and in the US we don't expect this market to grow like exponentially in any way we we definitely believe it will grow it will grow a lot but but it's not that it's just exploding in that way and you can also see that we we see that for for many years it's really portable batteries so battery from from personal mobility e-bikes and so that will actually be very important feedstock and electric vehicles it will be really really later that we will see that that will come and become more important I see that the number on Europe's here are wrong it should be like in the US it's until 2030 so recycling then if there will be no batteries for recycling do we recycle batteries well there will be a lot of batteries to recycle there will be a really a lot and there have been batteries for recycling we have been recycling batteries in in the US we've been recycling batteries in Europe for for many years this shows four different of the key challenges when when we are recycling batteries when we are talking about electric vehicle batteries we have the the first challenge is to disintegrate the battery pack to to make that to basically lift out the models modules and the cells and make it so we can handle the battery in the recycling process this is something that often is used or done already when we want to reuse a battery so so that is a good thing because that means also that the high value process can pay for for this process because this is usually quite costly because it will take a couple of hours for one or two persons to to to disintegrate the pack or open up the pack and make it available then then different kinds of processes can deal with this today we we have a few recyclers that can basically shred the complete pack we have several processes that can deal with the whole modules as such as well but many needs to go down further and be more disintegrate them and then we go down to the cell level and all different kind of processes must open the cells so we can actually start to to get into the actual material and that is something we call preprocessing and there are different kind of technologies to to do that that is something that has a challenge both in to do this efficiently and to to really get the material in a good state for it to be processed in the next step it has also health and safety aspects to it and local environmental challenges as we we we have off gases and yeah different kind of material that really need to be addressed then we have material separation and that means that we we now we want the to recover the the materials and get them back in some states so usually we would like to to get cobalt and nickel and manganese in in the salt that they were originally so usually this material will go back as a sulfate so in some camps like chloride but usually it's a cobalt nickel sulfate or lithium carbonate and that is obviously not a very easy process and it's about both about the purities and and and really to try to recover as much as possible from each each element and then a last part is really if we all can go that far to do material regeneration so we actually create new battery materials out of it that can either be part of the actual recycling process or it can be something that the cathode or a precursor manufacturing is dealing with and of some reason recycling has so is so often described as a technology play and of course it's it's not anything or not something that anything anyone can do it's a it's a lot of IP behind but it's not true that this is not something that we haven't been able to do for many years I mean we we have had especially in China and in South Korea we have had recyclers that in doing battery recycling and put back the materials into cathode materials for for more than 15 years they have had a couple of really important advantages and one being that they actually are producing batteries and they are producing battery materials which means that they need battery materials they also have had access to much more feedstock due to the the production waste coming from the battery production but also because collectors have seen a market and this and of that reason they have basically got most of the batteries in the world so that of that reason they've been able to to scale the processes much more than what we have had been able to do in Europe or in or in America as you can see here there are several different kind of routes there are many more routes and than this basically it's usually about that the batteries are shredded but we have also processes where we are applying smelting to it so we basically create an alloy that later can be processed in hardware metallurgically which is the case for all of these so either we we mechanically open up the cells or we are melting the cells down but it's both of the same reason really that create a material that then can be processed further I have never really understood why we are talking about a hydro metallurgical process versus pyro metallurgical process because it's really either a mechanical process or a pyro metallurgical process that later will go in a hydro metallurgical process and in the same thing here I mean we have several different kind of routes for the hydro metallurgical route processes that has been in industrial use for for many years and then we have new processes that I mean doing it differently and in some case more innovative and something we are talking a lot about today not least in the US is the case for what we call direct recycling that we basically are different kind of technologies can be anything from a dry technology but also in wet technologies where we co precipitate the materials and basically not separate the different kind of salts but we go back again directly into the the capital materials and it's also important to understand that we we have products from recycling then on different levels we have um pardon me Hans Eric I hate to interrupt but we are running very short on time can you okay right then we are that's great yeah we also showed this one the last slide here is um we have today recycling capacity that is more than what we expect that will be battery and for for the next decade a lot of that is in China but we are basically coming into the same situation in the west so thank you that's our reform no no no no thank you very much so this is marjones one of the hosts today we are getting a poll question ready for the audience and just a reminder if you want to ask questions please type them into the um question and answer window so the poll question should be on your screen now why don't we go ahead and and make your selections and we'll close that out in five four three two one so the question that was asked was where you find information about how to recycle batteries in your community and the local fire marshal is the only one that really is a bad answer call to recycle or call to cycle.org and earth 911 both are websites devoted completely to battery recycling about any type of battery and google is a good start but it does not always give you the most up-to-date information and occasionally can lead you to erroneous places but most communities if you type in your zip code you'll find out where to recycle your batteries so thank you guys for participating in that i will now it's my great pleasure to introduce our next speaker uh rebecca siyes is assistant professor of mechanical engineering and environmental and ecological engineering at prudu her research focuses on the technology and policy challenges of integrating energy storage for decarbonizing electricity transportation and industrial systems she holds a bachelor's from columbia and mechanical engineering and a phd in engineering and public policy from carnegie melin her 2019 paper uh nature sustainability paper on lithium ion battery recycling is one of the most thorough treatments that we found in preparing for this webinar it should be required reading for anyone interested in battery end-of-life issues so without further ado i will turn it over to rebecca the floor is yours thanks mark for that kind introduction i'm excited to share a bit about some of that work on um environmental impacts of battery recycling um so as uh honzer sort of got alluded to and talked about in his presentation um there are a lot of energy intensive materials that go into these battery chemistries um and they end up being a key driver of sort of the cost and embodied emissions when we go to manufacture batteries uh from the get go um so many of these cathode materials include transmission metals like nickel and cobalt and so um those are very an energy intensive to produce they there's a lot of emissions associated with that um but we have sort of seen some shifts um in sort of the market trends for the exact sort of flavor of lithium ion battery chemistry that's being deployed as um the market has responded to some of these challenges and so this is a plot from bluebird new new energy finance showing how their projections of demand for cobalt specifically have changed over the years and so the blue line from 2019 shows this really uh staggering growth in uh demand for cobalt while their most recent projection from 2022 that yellow line at the bottom shows a much slower growth um over the next sort of 10 years or so um and that's really driven by um the market being able to respond and shift to using battery chemistries that have lower fractions of cobalt or adopting cobalt free uh cathode materials like little lithium iron phosphate um that was mentioned before and so we've made been able to make some shifts around that but it does sort of impact the uh emissions associated with um manufacturing batteries um from raw materials and um how that compares to recycling processes and so there are also other battery materials that can be energy intensive that will really drive and contribute to recycling emissions um so again we've got those cathode materials that can sort of vary by battery chemistry um on the anode side we have graphitic carbon typically and so that can either become a contributor um if you are deploying something like a thermal or pyrometallurgical process um become sort of a source of co2 emissions um similarly most electrolytes have organic solvents plastic separators within those layers and so those can also contribute to the emissions from a recycling process and then you also have metals for current collectors um which can be recycled and by more conventional means but are a contributor to the overall sort of embodied emissions of a battery and so then when we think about how these different uh battery materials come together in an ultimate design um all of those factors of the material selection um also impact are impacted by uh the battery design itself um so as Hans Eric mentioned uh there's uh a few kind of typical um battery formats and so in our studies we focus on either coach cells or uh and then jelly roll cells um where you've got um these electrode layers um and ideally you would be able to increase the thickness of these electrode layers so that you're storing a lot more energy um for every piece of material within a battery couch cells historically had a bit more design flexibility to achieve sort of these thicker electrode layers especially as we think about larger format applications like electric vehicles but more recently there have been efforts to try and increase the energy density an active material within um jelly roll sort of cylindrical cells as well I think Tesla has called it their biscuit tin sort of design basically trying to have these same benefits um from increasing the amount of actual usable storable energy materials within battery cells um to reduce sort of the embodied emissions per kilowatt hour of energy storage capacity and so when we look at um sort of the embodied emissions just to manufacture these different types of batteries um from our study we again considered um what this would look like in a couple different electricity grids and so a lot of the energy and emissions are associated with um electricity and so we compared like the US average versus um two different electricity grids and we see that as the sort of battery chemistry varies we have different results in terms of embodied CO2 for cylindrical and pouch cells and so for these high energy density nickel and cobalt containing battery chemistries there wasn't as a substantial difference per kilowatt hour depending on what type of cell you were building but when we ran the study a few years ago the energy density of lithium iron phosphate or LFP batteries was much lower and so if you wanted to make these smaller cylindrical cells you ended up having a lot of extra material relative to the amount of energy you were storing um and so you had this higher embodied emissions associated which had been manufacturing these smaller LFP cells we didn't see as drastic of an increase we were had a little bit more design flexibility in a pouch cell but there are these high embodied emissions associated with just manufacturing any battery from the get-go and so the idea for recycling is to be able to either beat or greatly reduce some of these emissions associated with manufacturing and so for our study again we sort of had to bin our the vast sort of quantities of that of recycling processes out there because there are obviously every sort of company has their own special sort of secret sauce of how they combine different techniques to go from a full battery pack to something you would actually want to recover and so we started we use pyrometallurgical recycling where basically your melting battery material is down into a sort of transition metal alloy and so the heat for those processes is derived from fossil fuel sources whether that's natural gas sometimes it can still be either a coal or a coke as well um typically lithium has been left in the slag although as the price of lithium has come up there's been more interest in trying to recover that material and then the recovered material sort of output of that traditional pyrometallurgical process would need to be reprocessed to become what you would actually want to put into a battery grade precursor the second sort of bin of processes we considered was this hydrometallurgical where we're basically using solvents to separate out battery materials and precipitate specific target products hydrometallurgical processes are typically much lower temperature and the emissions are associated with some electricity and also the solvents that are used throughout those processes and the recovered material is typically closer to battery grade although it might not necessarily be quite at the same purity that you would ultimately want to have in a battery manufacturing process and then we also considered direct recycling and so these are definitely more in earlier stage technologies than sort of pyrometallurgical or hydrometallurgical processing per se but the advantage of this direct recycling method is that you can maintain some of the structure that you've already built into manufacturing these combinations of metals into a cathode material but ideally you would have prior knowledge of what material you're trying to recycle right so you want to know what battery what kind of battery materials are input into this process and again you need to relithiate the battery materials because as the batteries had cycled over their first life the amount of lithium present in the actual cathode material is depleted over time and so you need to replace that if you actually want to get it back to the same quality that you would install in a new battery and so to compare those different processes we we used a comparative analysis of how a recycled battery from a manufacturing's perspective would compare from the to the emissions associated with producing a new battery from scratch and so again we did this for different types of battery architectures right so we did cylindrical and pouch cells and again we repeated this process for NMC cathodes NCA cathodes and this lithium iron phosphate right so some of them that were containing nickel and cobalt and some of them that were not and so we can see in each of the cases that we were considering the pyrometallurgical recycling had a net increase in CO2 emissions right so because you are consuming these fossil fuel resources to reprocess that battery material there's always going to be an emissions associated with that process and if you think about the constituent components of these batteries there are a lot of components that if you engage them in a thermal process that they will have that they will also themselves contribute to CO2 emissions from a hydro metallurgical perspective we saw that for the nickel and cobalt containing cylindrical cells that there is potential for emissions reductions although there was a lot of uncertainty on those predictions and on those estimates and so a lot of that was because you were able to recover the increased amount of metal that comes from the cylindrical batteries that's available to offset some of these emissions as well so if you're recovering like steel or other current collectors that can also help to reduce the overall emissions and we didn't see that same increase in pouch cells which have larger fractions of electrode materials relative to other metals and so then when we looked at the direct recycling for these cobalt and nickel heavy chemistries we saw that there were net reductions in CO2 emissions especially for these pouch cells that had larger fractions of cathode material relative to other cell designs and so then the important thing to note is that when we were looking at this and we were comparing for LFP batteries to other chemistries the reason that you know LFP batteries are so inexpensive is because we've gotten very good at producing the input materials right so iron phosphates those are easily relatively easily mined we have a lot of infrastructure available for that and so we weren't necessarily seeing the same offsets because they don't have really really energy intensive materials within them to the same extent that the nickel or cobalt takes to produce and so until those conditions change we're not necessarily seeing emissions reductions given the sort of current state of technologies in the state of where we're producing a lot of the solvents and other materials used to conduct these recycling processes and so I think moving forward there's a lot of interesting questions about how battery recycling will be impacted by further changes in battery materials right so we've got these sandwich layers and so increasing the specific capacity of just the materials that we use to store energy within these batteries will inherently help the emissions reduce the emissions of manufacturing and recycling per kilowatt hour right so you're still producing perhaps the same kilograms of material but per kilowatt hour of energy stored in that material there's less embodied energy and embodied emissions the processes that we're using to recycle these batteries have to be able to adapt to the different mass fractions of materials we might need to add things like new solvents especially to a hydrometallurgical process if the content of battery materials is changing we're having smaller fractions of cobalt perhaps additional materials that we weren't using and weren't as prevalent in earlier stages of electric vehicles made transform sort of what's necessary from a technology perspective and then the transitions to low or no cobalt cathodes inherently mean that we are probably are producing those materials from their raw forms with lower emissions and so if we want to have net greenhouse gas emissions offsets compared to that alternative material we have to have recycling processes that are both more efficient and utilize more low carbon electricity and so the other big piece is that this isn't happening in a vacuum right so battery recycling will inherently be impacted by changes in our overall energy system so our electricity systems continue to decarbonize and so that will reduce emissions at recycling facilities through their electricity consumption and it also might from an upstream perspective reduce the emissions associated with producing solvents that are used in many of these processes but if we're using fossil fuels directly in some of these recycling options we're not going to see those same emissions reductions because they're not capturing or reducing co2 emissions and so if we think about sort of where it moves forward if you can incorporate more things like mechanical recycling or mechanical disassembly as opposed to pyrometallurgical processing that could be a way to further reduce associated emissions and then transitioning to more flexible options that don't necessarily utilize fossil fuel resources and so just to summarize so today's recycling processes don't necessarily guarantee emissions reductions when you compare manufacturing from new materials this is especially true if we've gotten very good at producing the raw materials used in some of these battery technologies recycling has to continue to evolve and adapt to changes in battery materials right so as the market develops there will always be sort of new trends in battery chemistries that are most common and so we have to be able to adapt our recycling capacity to those trends and so finally recycling can provide some assistance as Hans Eric mentioned the demand for lithium ion battery materials will continue to grow exponentially over the the next couple of decades and we are going to face a lag for a very very long time in available material recyclable materials to actually form this circular economy and so we do still need to consider local environmental burdens associated with mining and citing new facilities but recycling can help on the margins but realistically we will probably face that those challenges for a very long time so with that I would just like to acknowledge a lot of this work was done when I was at Carnegie Mellon and it was funded by the National Science Foundation okay thank you very much Rebecca hi everybody my name is Ian Rowe I am your co-moderator for this session and I'll introduce the next speaker in a minute but first I think we have another poll question that we were going to introduce and this one is on recycling rates of different materials so out of materials listed there which of these materials has the lowest recycling rate in the U.S. lead acid batteries, lithium ion, HDPE clear hollow polymer or PET bottles? Any guesses so I'll give you five four three two one and the answer is lithium ion batteries yes and I don't know if we're going to put yes so lithium ion batteries are currently recycled according to the DOE numbers at less than five percent while lead acid is up around 95 percent and HDPE clear milk jug type plastics and PET bottles are recycling around 29 percent there's a lot of things at play here lead batteries have a lot of heavy regulations associated with them and there's a lot of systems already in place to incentivize the recycling of them and plastics are all have a lot of locations where you can recycle them already lithium ion batteries are not acceptable like you can't put them at curbside most places yet and finding places to actually drop them off is actually difficult in some locations so now with that poll question out of the way we will move on to our third and final speaker for the day Brian Polzen he's a process engineer with Argonne National Lab he supports R&D of lithium ion batteries for transportation he focuses on material evaluation and recycling and scale up of batteries his published work touches on many aspects of lithium ion battery development and performance prior to joining Argonne he worked in industry and he has a master's degree from Illinois Institute of Technology and Material Sciences and Metallurgical Engineering and a BS from Iowa State University and Surinic Engineering with that Brian I'm going to kick it over to you hello everyone all good to be all good yep all right let me just hide that all right uh yes thank you for having me today and today I'm going to kind of touch on the future of lithium ion battery recycling so as Ian said I'm from Argonne National Laboratory I am also the Deputy Director of the Resale Center at Argonne National Laboratory so the Resale Center is the DOE Vehicles Technologies Office for Battery Recycling R&D Center it is a collaboration of four national laboratories and four universities so the the national laboratories are Argonne National Lab National Renewable Energy Laboratory Idaho National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory and we have four universities which is WPI University of San Diego California Tennessee State University and Michigan Tech involved in this and the way the Resale Center is broken down is we've got five focus areas the first one is the direct recycling of materials which has 26 projects in it and this is uh as some of the speakers before me mentioned this is primarily focused on direct recycling of materials so how do we get materials out of these batteries in the same form that they went in of course rejuvenated cleaned up to be put back into a a battery we also have uh and we've got you know 26 projects in there the second focus area is what we call advanced resource recovery so in these 13 projects these are more focused on what can we do to aid in the hydrometallurgical and pyrometallurgical recycling processes to improve yield performance purity levels uh of of processes associated with those recycling technologies we also have eight projects in design designed for sustainability this is mostly looking at second life effects on recyclability applications for second life grading of cells and also removing of cells from ev packs and how do we do that successfully cheaply and safely the other main focus area that we have is modeling and analysis so this one in the modeling world we've got a you know in total we have 11 projects there in the modeling world we're looking at process modeling so both TEA techno economic modeling as well as life cycle analysis modeling we have several supply chain type models looking at the effects of recycling on materials flow not in the united states but all over the world and how is how are these materials going to help meet the demands going forward that evs and other applications are going to require a lithium ion batteries in the last one last focus area that we have is cross cutting efforts and these are facilities that we utilize at the different national laboratories such as the cell analysis modeling and prototyping facility the post test facility as well as the materials engineering research facility so these are facilities to help do work on there okay so you know the great question is well what does the future look like for recycling and what I like to say is there's no single recycling technology that's going to win out in the future every recycling technology is going to have its own place in the in the recycling environment there's advantages invent and disadvantages for direct recycling there's advantages and disadvantages for hydro and same thing with pyro um and so some of those advantages and disadvantages are also going to change with what the type of material that's being processed you know if you have consumer electronics versus manufacturing scrap versus end of life batteries they're all in different states of of disrepair and so some may need less work to get it back into a usable state some may need more and so that may dictate the potential for which recycling process to use to get the the most benefit out of recycling those materials and lastly you know companies are really going to are going to balance what what's important to them or you know safety is it cost is it environmental impact energy usage water usage um you know if I'm in a desert you know Nevada or Utah you know do I want to create a process that has a huge you know amount of water usage where that could be a huge cost uh in that location to have water there uh where energy is cheap so maybe you know you would you would use a process or processes that are more energy intensive based upon the location um of where you're trying to site your your facility safety um you know not just safety for you know you could look at it as in terms of safety for your workers as well safety for the environment if I have an electric vehicle battery that that has been in a crash or a damaged you know defective or recalled battery do I want people trying to break that down into the module or cell level um wearing you know in in some cases it might just be able to be best to just handle that is and accept the loss and recyclable content for the safety of handling that so all of these these things are going to be decisions that that company and industry is going to have to decide and balance um what makes the most sense for them so one of the technologies that's really emerging in the recycling field uh is what was mentioned before is is direct recycling um direct recycling is is one of those high risk high reward technologies uh it's it's been in development for a handful of years uh there's been a lot of work into it and you know we've de-risk uh some of the processes used to do it but there's still more work that needs to be done on top of being able to scale this system up to a pilot or industrial scale um so yeah it's behind the curve in terms of hydro and pyro because those have been used for years and and not only in in the battery industry but in other industries recycling industries as well so really direct is is kind of starting from from scratch and so you know the the people that are working on direct recycling are really working to invent new processes trying to do things differently in a specific way um and and so you know we're starting at the bench scale research and graduating these processes um up to larger and larger scales as we see success coming out of out of those results um on top of that you know there's multiple ways to do any single step in in a recycling process so we're trying to also look at multiple steps within a in within a recycling process to give again industry options to say well what's most important to you you know here's multiple ways to do the same process you can pick and choose what you would like to do and also in some of these uh processes uh you know they can also benefit the other recycling processes so especially on the front end of this say the battery shredding step the electrolyte recovery and the the cathode anode and metal separation if there's improvement in those processes they can also benefit both the hydro and the pyro process by providing those recycling technologies with a better or a higher impurity black mass going into them so they would benefit overall and so typically here's a direct recycling process flow so you start with end-of-life batteries and we would shred those you would recover the electrolyte and then you would do some cathode anode and metal separation step and let's just focus on the cathode because that's the most valuable material right now coming out of lithium-ion battery you would end up with a cathode carbon black and pvdf mix and then you have some carbon black and pvdf removal process so that all's you're left with is the cathode material the cathode then can either go get relithiated or upcycled and then that material you would have is a roof-juvenated cathode and be put back into the battery manufacturing process so in in relithiation that's the process of adding the lost lithium back into the cathode material but then we also have what's called upcycling so you know some of the the the ev batteries you know they're lasting 10 15 20 years that is a very old technology so we're looking at how do we convert some of those old technologies in nmc say 111 and converting them to say nmc811 which is more of a more of an industrial relevant cathode chemistry and so we're looking at processes how to not just recycle the material but make it into more of a state-of-the-art material so one of the examples you know we're looking at at relithiation technologies at relithiation step so the traditional route is the thermal or solid state route where you're taking your lithium source like lithium hydroxide and then you're doing some type of annealing step or calcination step to get that lithium back into the crystal structure and make that cathode particle like new but we're looking at other methods more novel methods that could either reduce cost reduce emissions you know reduce the the energy cost the water cost but again to provide multiple solutions to companies and de-risk them so that companies can can make their own you know do their choose your own adventure on the recycling process so we're looking at hydrothermal processes for for relithiation we have a brand new novel one called which uses a redox mediator to to get the lithium into the the spent cathode material we have an ionothermal or molten salt system that we're looking at as well as an electrochemical system where we would actually take spent cathode material recoded onto an electrode and in a roll-the-roll process use electrochemistry to relithiate that cathode in an electrode form so all of these are really novel novel processes and and we're looking at you know again to to try and scope out and de-risk technologies for industry to pick up and use in in their in their processes so you know what a couple some of the questions that I was asked to answer is you know kind of you know what does changing chemistries have you know what's the impact of changing chemistries on on recycling going to have and so really the future of batteries is wide open there's so many different routes that that batteries for EVs or grid storage or consumer electronics can go and they there's a lot of unknowns out there so the first case like silicon anodes they're starting to make it into EV batteries these days the the cathode and the electrolytes and everything should be relatively the same but what you know what additional separation steps are needed if you're adding another material into these processes you're going to have to create another material to remove it from the from the materials that you want so potentially adding silicon could add separation steps which would increase the cost no matter what process you're using potentially to have to remove that or if you're trying to look at it from a direct value or even hydrothermal what value would that recovered silicon have is is are you can you find an application or a product that you can still make money on by having to recover that silicon solid state batteries the recycling is going to become a much much more difficult you're there's a lot of different materials that are being discussed about what the actual solid state electrolytes is going to be and the more materials you introduce into the system the harder again the harder it's going to be to pull them out to the purity levels that you need it's a it's a slightly different battery how it's assembled and so you may need more mechanical processing or material separate separation steps to pull those those materials out and again because you have different and more materials the impurity content content downstream is going to inherently come up and so you're going to have to figure out how to remove those materials and you know again if you're going to if you're going to separate or move pull them out what value do these additional new materials have it's a great question that it's going to have to be answered in terms of long term um lithium metal batteries you know the big one it would be safety issues you know shredding and black mass transportation you can have exposed lithium metal to to oxygen or moisture and that's a highly reactive system so the safety and the handling of of recycling of lithium metal batteries is going to be a huge factor that people are going to have to look at uh and and design systems around to to make sure that everyone is safe another technology that that's on the horizon is lithium sulfur batteries um this one is a very similar argument to uh lithium you know the current lithium iron phosphate batteries you know it's the the value of the materials versus the cost of recycling um is it is it not going to be financially advantageous to recycle lithium iron or lithium sulfur batteries um is lithium the only recoverable material in a value of a value in that system um so these are questions and things that that as these chemistries are changing we're going to have to answer and lastly you know sodium iron batteries um you know it i think the processes could be similar to current lithium iron batteries today um but again you know what materials are in those our systems and are they worthy of of recovery um so that's where you know the the techno economic modeling in the lca of of the recycling processes and the materials in there are going to be critical now and in the future to understand you know what recycling processes make the most sense so another one is is second life applications and i know han's touched upon this but you know what do you do with batteries after their second life use um and one of the arguments i you know i hear is that uh you have to choose between is your battery going to go to second life use or recycling and i really think that's a misnomer that that people ask that question it's not it's not an either or choice um because even when batteries you know if they do go into a second life it's not like they automatically are going to get landfilled after second second life use they're going to get recycled so really the only thing that second life use does is push out when the batteries are available for recycling so you know it could be an additional five to ten years for that battery to make it back into the recycling stream and have that material uh be recycled and put back into the supply chain um and so you know that that's just the the the question of of recycle over second life but really second life applications are just in their infancy there are so many questions around you know of how do you you know how do you make second life applications a real thing you know how do you source your batteries are they from a single manufacturer are they from a different manufacturer how do you deal with different states of health and in different states of charges of batteries how do you create a business model around something that you may or may not control uh because of the changing chemistries or formats in electric vehicle batteries and the big one is really you know how do you warranty your product or get insurance for your product or certification um these are all great questions that people are going to want to see if they're going to put a second life battery uh into you know a home or a business for for energy storage so the great news is there's still plenty of our dnd that needs to be done in this area to help answer some of these questions and help help move this this uh uh you know move this industry along into something um you know uh more permanent and a viable option for end of life batteries usage lastly designed for sustainability um is is a is a great great topic it has got the biggest potential to impact how things are recycled at least in terms of EV batteries and even consumer electronics but it's the hardest to gain traction you know and there's really two factors that make this very difficult if you're designing a new battery component it could take years before that gets into production and so that means you know that that benefit of something like that will take a long time before you get to see it back so um there's a there's a design cycle that we have to think about there's some companies that are doing it now um some OEMs looking at factors like this but again it's still for batteries that that need to get designed that need to get put into a model year and then those batteries need to make it through their use life and come back into the recycling stream the other big factor is how do you convince an OEM or pack manufacturer to spend extra money upfront um for a benefit that they will not see such as reduced recycling cost so if you say you know don't weld these joints together use this nut and bolt um and that would make it easier the OEM or the pack manufacturer is going to have to buy that bolt but they may not see you know there's no advantage for them to add money to their pack costs for someone else to see the benefit now I think there is you know there is a potential break in this area in that I think you're starting to see a lot more OEM or pack manufacturers or battery manufacturers looking at vertical integration through either joint ventures or production contracts and that's extending into the recycling world and so now you could see a justification for hey I can spend a couple more dollars upfront because I might be able to save five dollars on the back end and guess what that means the material that I'm procuring is going to be five dollar cheaper on the back end so I come out three dollars ahead in something like this um and so we're starting to see this but I think you know these concepts are still a ways off but again there needs to be a really strong RD focus along with strong testing and analysis because these you know these these substitutions that you know we would want for to enable design for recycling or easier recyclability of packs and modules an OEM needs to understand the testing and analysis on how are these systems work make sure that they don't break down over times um and so this is mark we we've got a lot of great questions can you kind of start wrapping it up please thank you all right so why does this all matter so DOE and the White House's goal is you know we're looking at a 50 percent EV adoption rate for new cars sales by 2030 so that is looking at 7.6 million out is 7.6 new EVs on the road to be sold in 2030 and so there's a lot of different ways that we can we can hit those numbers by enabling lower cost batteries and so again looking at next generation battery r&d looking at different ways of recycling materials and then also through the the infrastructure act um and funding development of the U.S. supply chain and so one of the groups that that is has been put together is this group called the federal consortium for advanced batteries and there's a specific task group that's looked at recycling and reuse so the Department of Energy by itself is not going to be able to solve all of the recycling problems and so we're going to really have to get organizations across all organizations so EPA DOE DOT DOD state commerce USGS RPE to put in and talk about well how can we affect the recycling industry how do we either make it easier how do we make regulations known um so that we can enable this recycling technology so this is a group that meets regularly and here are their near and long-term goals uh for the fcab recycling group and then lastly I'll no I'll just I think this is yep so um if everyone knows the infrastructure the bipartisan infrastructure law or bill um has really uh has been uh passed and has provided a huge number of opportunities uh in propping up or helping the domestic battery supply chain and so here's a number of different sections within the infrastructure law the bill law of funding opportunities in different areas uh all across the supply chain and so these are some are currently in process right now some will be coming out shortly but these would be sections that I believe that this group on recycling would be very interested in following up on and so yep I just would like to say thank you to everyone who helped put this together and participated great thank you so we're we have the last poll question posted now that question is how likely are you to favor building a recycling facility in your community extremely likely somewhat likely or not very likely so if you go ahead and um answer that poll question please this one there is really no right answer this is just a poll to see what the community says we'll close this one in five four three two one and I don't know we'll put this in the in the oh there we go so uh majority people said somewhat likely at 60 percent 30 extremely likely and only 10 percent it not very likely so I'd like to kick off the q and a uh portion here by starting with a couple of very hopefully quick uh clarifying questions and they're both directed at Rebecca uh we had people ask what you meant by specific energy when you use that term and then the second question directed at you was to go back and and give a simple explanation of how emissions are negative for the recycling processes please sure so specific energy is just per kilogram how much energy can be stored in some kind of cathode material so as battery materials have gotten better that number has typically gone up right so you can you can store more energy uh per sort of kilogram of stuff uh that you're installing and then um for the negative emissions so this was a comparative analysis and so we were looking at if you were baking a battery from uh recycled materials or if you're making a battery from sort of raw materials manufacturing um what would the net avoided emissions be and so anything above that sort of zero line was a positive right net negative net reductions and avoided emissions right so you were reducing the emissions if it was a positive number and then anything below zero meant that you were increasing emissions so you weren't avoiding the emissions you were creating more um so hopefully that sort of clarifies uh those questions I think so certainly did for me Ian you got a question you want to ask um I do indeed thank you um let me see if I can get my camera back up there it is um so we talked as OEMs today continue to develop and work to improve EVs they'll of course have their own incentives to improve their battery capacity to improve their vehicles and you know put their own secret sauce into the process um and they also might be incentivized to not tell industry at large what they're working on and what specifics about their battery are so how does this um kind of this doesn't really align with recyclability if you have everybody doing their own thing but it doesn't really align with recyclability can any of the panelists speak to this potential incompatibility between OEMs trying to do their own thing while also trying to stand up a recycling infrastructure well I I can certainly talk a little bit about that um I agree that um I mean that connection is not very I mean it's not great um even if you talk to the car dismantlers or car breakers I mean they uh even in Europe where we have quite tight legislation around this and the the relationship between the OEMs and the car dismantlers is it's not um it's not great and many believe that they don't even can get access to to disassembly instructions and how to do that so and and even less I believe they're designed for recycling is something that it's taking it's taken into into consideration and I can understand that I mean it's it's really batteries that will last for a very long time um it's still a growing market it's still a market where we are where technology is discovered and so I mean it's really about performance it's really about to to minimizing cost in a transition which for the OEMs are very costly no worries very costly so but I think there are another a few other incentives there I mean designed for repairability for instance designed for remanufacturing we have had a few huge recalls among some of the OEMs that has been very very costly which means that they I think there are incentivized to to to know that if the same thing will happen again and it makes sense for them to to be able to to remove either cell groups or or modules and in in in a way that is also would benefit later on for the recycling process and I think for instance like if you take BYD spray batteries and I hear very few complaints in fact about the disassembly of that battery so in some cases I think it actually goes in the right direction so so Hans Eric while you're on the hot seat I'll keep you there lots of questions about our poll question about 5% because you already dissed that in your talk but I certainly triangulated many of the references going back even to Bureau of Mines and other data on cobalt recycling rates and where it was being lost and it it does look like most people you indicated Russia or excuse me Australia at 3% US saying less than 5% recycling why is there the big discrepancy and what do you think the right number is I think it's highly unfortunate that this is used so widely and it's used in a I think in a really amateurish way and there are two 5% numbers that generally they are both a little bit more than 10 years old one generated come from Europe and other come from a paper in the US and in none of the cases see this actually they could show what these 5% came from in one of the American papers come from 95% landfill and if you want to measure how much any kind of product is landfill there is only one place you have to look and that's in the landfill and as far as I know there are only two papers one American one day went in from Denmark that actually look at what is actually found in in the landfills and and they find the fine batteries the fine lithium ion batteries they find actually more lead acid batteries they find more alkaline batteries and another thing when it comes to the comparison of lead acid lead acid recycling ratio that often is referred to like 99% that is a ratio that is based on what waste generated or how much the batteries that are recycled compared to what the waste which is generated and then you have to measure lithium ion batteries in the same way and nobody really knows how much waste that is generated from lithium ion batteries. Well let me push back just a little bit in the lead acid case it's clear that we've regulated something there and in the case of lead acid the companies that deliver the batteries take the recycled batteries I don't see a metaphor at all like that for for lithium ion today it just it just doesn't exist the number of things that I can't get rid of with lithium ion batteries is large. Well let us say batteries first of all I mean they've been in the market for 150 years and been in our vehicles for 100 years you have to replace them every three or four years correct so you have a very different kind of flow of batteries while lithium ion batteries usually sit in the whole life in the vehicles and these vehicles are also traded and removed and the same thing for lead acid batteries I mean if you look at how much lithium ion batteries that are placed on the market then you'll compare okay so and how much are we recycled if you looked at my chart how few lithium ion batteries that 10 years ago were placed on the American market and I'll say most of them batteries have not been available in the US because they are in the rest of the world informed in laptops wherever where they have been used but also if if you would do the same for lead acid batteries I mean more than a million vehicles ice vehicles from the US are exported to other countries every year they contain lead acid batteries so I mean how could it be even 99% when they're actually a huge amount of lead acid batteries in the US are leaving the country and are not recycled in the US but that can be because we are looking at waste generator from lead acid but we are not looking at waste generated or available for collection that is another term we can all correct you so when it comes to what is the actual the correct number very hard to to say in fact because you have to see what is the actual waste what should be recycled and I think we are we are not that hundred percent but we are not very far from it obviously there are a lot of small batteries that goes into appliances which people actually thrown in the waste I don't think a lot of people throw mobile phones in the waste but they might throw toys or power banks or things like that and we hear these stories about how they go into material recovery facilities and for sure they are creating fires so that is a real problem absolutely but that is rarely anyone throws an EV battery in the trash I absolutely agree the EVs are our market and hopefully the lead acid in some of the success that we have there proving that we can keep the recycling rate as high as it is is an example with where the transportation batteries take off it will be a similar thing right I'm optimistic more than pessimistic about the lead acid it is more difficult with product with long lifetimes I mean when we compare with P and P and P and T bottles and things like that I mean that is something that we consume within a couple of weeks after they were produced so it is much easier to create more circular flows of that kind of products if you have lifetimes of 10 or 20 years it is both difficult to actually create these processes for it because the incentive comes so much later really into setting these facilities up I think today actually we I mean from our consumer producer perspective we can be happy because we are building more recycling capacity today than what we would need for many many years so Ian you got a favorite question now yeah I've seen a couple of similar to this come through but it mostly I guess this is directed first at Rebecca related to the non-carbon dioxide in our environmental impacts so you talked about the the LCA of most of these recycling processes can you touch on any of the other environmental impacts of them and which which are the ones that can be toned down the best with RMT perhaps yeah so and it really depends we didn't necessarily do a full like digging into each you know nitty gritty LCA potential impact I think there's a lot associated with potential air pollution criteria pollution emissions if you were doing a pyrometallurgical process I think citing those kinds of facilities in the United States has been pretty challenging at least new facilities of that kind of type and then again sort of as Bryant mentioned some of the water challenges associated with the chemical processing can be a larger percentage especially in some of the more water stress regions of the United States and so citing those appropriately might also be a challenge so I got one for Bryant here what is the current TRL level of direct recycling technologies that you guys are investigating at resell you know I would say a lot of our processes are TRL maybe two to four or so but there are actually two companies or three companies in the United States that are actually standing up pilot lines for direct recycling purposes so there there is an industry being built around direct recycling there's there's companies out there with skin in the game and they believe in the technology and so yeah they're they're this is not just a direct recycling is not just a lab dream it's being rolled out into industry so to stay on this question so a lot of what you described was direct recycling and some innovations there does resell investigate ways to improve the solvent extraction process yes that that was in the advanced resource recovery focus area so we've got a number of technologies that we're we're developing right now to again like different methods of of separations of materials either via solvents or other methods again to get to a high quality low impurity content product that could be either converted to a salt or if it is a salt itself can be reintroduced into the cathode manufacturing process okay i asked whether we can do one more question since i haven't gotten an answer i'll try to squeeze another question in a couple people have asked about the european battery passport can somebody explain what that is and whether they think it's a good idea or not well i can talk about it so the battery passport is um it's um it should be an interview well basically a passport i mean it could be a digital um i mean containing information about the actual battery it is not clear exactly what it will contain um but the idea is obviously that you should have everything from dismantling instructions to to um you should have information about the actual materials and that is included what kind of chemistry the cathode or the anodaz so it has everything to to do with making the situation better for anyone from like manufacturers refurbishers to recyclers and so this information will follow the batteries there is also of course um a wish to be able to track the batteries um i think a little bit of the inspiration comes from a battery passport that is available in china where you where they are tracking the batteries throughout the different stages of their life cycle it is not uh it's not an easy task uh it's one thing to have a battery passport but you also need passport controls so you need border control and that is i mean also you see really to to um to introduce and i think that that is what where china has had problems i mean the because the batteries have not really taken the route that everybody wished for i mean china the chinese market is quite similar in fact to not least the american market that the highest value usually wins or the highest bidder win the batteries um but i mean it is a very exciting idea i don't think it will change a lot but i think it's great to to that you have more information that you can cater to the i mean those companies that actually we deal with the batteries further on so i mean in that way it's it's great but i i don't think it will be revolutionary in the sense that it will keep the batteries in the in in the market better than if we wouldn't have it well we're rapidly coming up on our time so i certainly this has been a lot of fun helping put this session together and i want to thank all of our three speakers the for the great talks it's been wonderful i certainly learned a lot and hope everybody in the audience did and i can now give e in the last word so hey thanks mark uh thanks to everybody on the line uh all the speakers next a lot appreciate your willingness to do this i certainly learned a lot um and i don't know if you had anything final to close this out with yeah so for everyone who is watching you're going to be redirected to a brief survey after the webinar and then uh if you'd like to subscribe for more updates or find out any more about the chemical sciences roundtable you can see our website and thank you so much for everyone attending thanks everybody take care