December 27th, 2022
As supply chains of battery materials are fragile, raw materials are getting expensive. At the same time vast amounts of old, done (cobalt-rich) batteries are now available for a circular economy. That’s why battery recycling is getting more and more attention! Plus, the EU Battery Regulation now forces battery makers to strictly follow sustainability rules, anyways. Let’s have a look at the recycling plans of Sweden’s largest battery maker Northvolt.
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Our podcast guest on this episode is Prof. Emma Nehrenheim. She is a Professor for Environmental Engineering at Mälardalen University. As an academic researcher and industry innovator she wants to deliver the world’s greenest battery for her employer. She summarizes her innovation efforts as follows: “It’s clear to me that batteries are the enabler to so much of [my] vision for electrification, but there are better and worse ways to build a battery from an environmental perspective.”
The “better way” of “building a battery” includes a functioning recycling strategy. Fortunately, scienists optimized two very sophisticated paths of how to recycle a useless, done battery: They are based on either (1) pyrometallurgic recycling and/or (2) hydrometallurgic recycling technologies. Pyrometallurgic techniques are already frequently used to get back common battery materials. But this comes with an enormous energy input. Northvolt‘s hydrometallurgical recycling technology on the other side retrieves lithium, nickel, cobalt, and other metals from its black mass. The process produces these metals at a rather high grade so they can be used to create new batteries afterwards. The hydromet technology works with all formats and chemistries of lithium-ion batteries and can recover almost all batteries’ materials. The following high-performing metal products produced from this black mass come with battery-grade purity levels: (1) Lithium carbonate, (2) Cobalt sulfate, (3) Nickel sulfate, (4) Manganese carbonate.
