Reuse of used battery

The battery is one of the basic components of any technical as well as indigenous intervention. Batteries enable an increasingly wide array of electric personal, light, and heavy-duty vehicles. The growth in deployments of lithium batteries creates a large flow of retired batteries. It is predicted that by 2030, retirements could exceed half a million vehicles annually or over 2 million metric tons of batteries per year. The majority of the consumer has found deposited the batteries after use in landfills however, lithium batteries contain valuable metals and other useful materials that can be recovered, processed, and reused to make more batteries.

After the primary use of batteries in vehicles, they need to be recycled or disposed of. Once the batteries are used in vehicles, they can be reused or repurposed for secondary life by recycling. Recycling the used battery helps to reduce environmental impacts from improper disposal. The recycling of lithium batteries is done by using pyrometallurgical, or smelting processes. These plants use high temperature (1500 ) to burn off impurities and recover cobalt, nickel and copper whereas lithium and aluminum are lost in these processes which are bounded with waste as slag. Smelting facilities are expensive and energy intensive which require toxic fluoride emissions and have relatively low rates of materials recovery.

According to the US Advanced Battery Consortium standards, an EV battery reaches the end of its usable life when its current cell capacity is less than 80% of the rated capacity. The actual retiring period of batteries are still unknown. Reuse extends the lifetime of batteries and potentially displace some new batteries from stationary applications, all of which reduce the overall impacts of battery production. In some cases, batteries can be used directly in another vehicles. The functioning modules and cells can often be recombined to create refurbished battery packs for other vehicles.

Sources: https://blog.ucsusa.org/hanjiro-ambrose/a-quick-guide-to-battery-reuse-and-recycling/

Figure: https://skinnonews.com/global/archives/9236