Greener e-bike batteries / industry practices?

[morphix]

Is the high replacement cost of batteries in part linked to lack of any recycling by manufacturers and wasteful practices?

Could better designed batteries with a more standardised/modular approach become serviceable items and so more easily re-celled by manufacturers?

What happens to old batteries at present? They are not easy things to dispose of, I assume you have to hand them to your local authority for disposal where they get taken to special landfill sites? Unless they get shipped to third world countries for salvage? But how much useful product is being thrown away? i.e. the case itself and the BMS, charger, and even some cells might still be good.

It seems quite economically wasteful to just throw all that away and buy all new kit each time a cell fails, plus there's the environmental impact.

Manufacturers are probably reluctant to adopt an open/standardised modular approach to batteries and may need or want to keep their technology proprietary to protect their product and business from what happened with the toner/ink industry and all the "compatible/refilled" cheaper clones.

But could we see cheaper "factory reconditioned" batteries or an purchase scheme that allows batteries to be serviced by manufacturers for a reasonable period?

If you think about, with cheaper courier services available now, this looks on the face of it quite do-able, as manufacturers can have batteries conveniently returned for under a fiver. At the very least, you could send the battery back for some discount off your next purchase? And manufacturers can make sure battery cells or parts that can't be recycled can be properly disposed of to minimise environmental impact..

Or perhaps the obstacle here is the lack of any manufacturers technical capability to do that in the UK at present?

Interested to hear peoples thoughts on this...

 

[flecc]

Recycling the lithium content is largely beyond our ability at present, One current report promises to bring recycling of about 50% of the lithium, but even that isn't an easy process. The rest of the content is often barely worth trying to recycle, soft plastic cell pouches or small cylindrical cell cases, all chemically contaminated, a thin plastic battery box, small metal contacts, surface mount component BMS board and occasionally a minimal LED driving circuit.

So some is possible, but getting any economic advantage is questionable, the cost of some maybe higher than new content.

Look at this soft pouch battery with it's 14 cell pouches for example:

 

[oigoi]

I can't imagine the world has got an endless supply of lithium so I think the industry needs to find ways of making the batteries recyclable. I am fed up of the way our society is so consumptive of the world's resources and things are just thrown in a hole in the ground when they are broken.

At the moment it might not be economically viable to recycle lithium batteries but, in time, as the supply of new lithium dwindles and it's price goes up it will be worthwhile recycling them I think

 

[flecc]

At the moment it might not be economically viable to recycle lithium batteries but, in time, as the supply of new lithium dwindles and it's price goes up it will be worthwhile recycling them I think

Yes, and hopefully techniques will be developed to recover all the lithium. Apparently it's a very difficult thing to do, in part because the lithium in our batteries does not exist in metallic form. Unfortunately the complexity of some of what we make means that sometimes recovery processes can be more environmentally damaging than not bothering.

 

[neptune]

I believe that recycling is technically possible given the will . After all , lithium does not exist in nature in a metallic form . It has to be refined from ores that probably have a much lower lithium content than dead batteries .

 

[flecc]

I believe that recycling is technically possible given the will .

It is as I've said, after much research to 50%, but with difficulty and at high cost.

 

[morphix]

It is as I've said, after much research to 50%, but with difficulty and at high cost.

I guess to environmentalists and green consumers what seems like a logical thing to do is not so straightforward. You have to understand the processes (environmental cost of recycling) and chemistry involved with batteries. Sometimes its just not worth it at our present level of technology, because of the way things are made. I suspected that might be the case with the actual cells, but did wonder about the housings, BMS and chargers etc. But flecc seems to suggest those play a relatively small part of the battery cost and BMS can't be easily recycled outside of a modular/standardised approach to battery manufacturing...even if you did that, the cell technology changes so frequently, you always need custom BMS made, and suitable housings? Each newer battery generation is effectively a brand new product, very different to the last?