Can EV Batteries Be Recycled? It’s Complicated, But It’s Already Happening

There's a mélange of highly toxic and incredibly valuable materials mixed up in the battery packs of every new EV on the road today, and for now at least, much of those materials can only be sourced from unfriendly places. Making matters worse, when batteries aren't properly recycled, they can do terrible damage to the environment. But don't worry, because that's not going to happen. Why? Because those materials are worth far too much to be left sitting in some U-Pull-It graveyard.

When an EV dies, many of the components of the battery stuffed in its belly are just as valuable as they were when they came out of the ground. With a little processing, the thought is that today's lithium-ion batteries can be recycled and remixed into new batteries to power the electric cars of the future, and to a certain extent that's already happening. EV battery recycling in many ways is just a new spin on age-old techniques for extracting valuable materials from no-longer-needed goods. However, the nature and rarity of the materials demands new technologies and approaches, and the need to implement those soon is growing ever more pressing given the flood of EVs hitting the roads.

Here's how advances in EV battery recycling will ensure that today's electric vehicles not only help the environment while they're on the road, but keep being of service long after they're put out to pasture.

Battery Basics

Before we delve into the details of how recycling EV batteries is evolving, let's run through some core battery concepts so that we're all on the same page.

Battery Cells

A battery cell is the smallest functional unit inside the overall pack that powers an electric car. Each cell is itself a battery, containing an anode (the negative electrode), and a cathode (the positive side). Those two units are separated by an electrolyte that facilitates the flow of ions, thus making the thing a functional battery.

Although they all share that same basic architecture, cell structure can vary widely. The most common types are cylindrical, pouch, and prismatic. Cylindrical cells, like the 18650 or 2170 cells used by Tesla in most of its cars, roll the anode and cathode in a tube with a separator in between. The result looks a lot like the AA battery tucked away inside your television's remote control.

Prismatic cells offer the same anode and cathode layering concept, but stacked in a rigid rectangular enclosure. No rolling means smaller gaps between individual cells and greater energy density within the overall pack.

Finally, there are pouch cells, which are similar in layout to prismatic cells but enclosed in a thin, soft pouch, reducing their weight and volume.

Battery Modules

Your average EV battery pack contains hundreds or thousands of cells. To better monitor their individual health and often to allow some degree of repairability for the overall battery pack, those cells are often separated into modules.

A module is simply a collection of cells all gathered together, effectively acting as one, larger cell. The electronics that monitor an EV's battery pack also track the performance and temperature of each module, so if one stops holding a charge or gets too hot, the car's computer can raise an error or even shut things down before anything terminal happens.

Battery Packs

An EV's battery pack is what powers the car, usually situated down in the floor. A pack is simply a collection of cells or modules, all encased together with common bus bars that deliver the electricity to and from the pack. Coolant channels also run through the pack to the individual modules or cells.

The important point in this hierarchy is that an individual cell going bad can result in the entire module needing to be replaced. In some cases, the whole pack must be replaced.

Such a pack would be the Tesla 4680 design used in newer vintages of the Model Y. This pack lacks a modular design, instead relying on hundreds of cells glued together. If any of the integrated cells requires replacing, the entire pack must be removed and recycled.

Recycling vs. Refurbishing

The small, rechargeable pouch cells in your smartphone aren't altogether different from the larger ones in an EV. Redwood Materials can handle both of those types and many more. The startup, founded in 2016 by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel, is one of the leading battery recyclers today. So far, Redwood has formed partnerships with the likes of Panasonic, Ford, and Volvo.

"Batteries include everything from production scrap out of battery cell manufacturing to an EV battery to an electric toothbrush," said Jackson Switzer, VP of business development at Redwood. "And then we turn those all the way back into battery materials."

Turning a battery back into raw materials means manually tearing it apart and grinding it down into its component elements, one of which has an ominous term: "black mass."

What's black mass? "It's a mix between nickel, manganese, and cobalt, or NMC," said Brian Skalovsky, director of battery recycling at Cox Automotive Mobility EV Battery Solutions, which handles all phases of EV battery life cycle logistics, including recycling. "That's a type of battery chemistry. There's also a little bit of carbon, a little bit of aluminum, a little bit of copper." Those valuable elements can be extracted, reprocessed, and used in new batteries.

But EV battery recycling doesn't have to be quite so dramatic. Increasingly, packs taken out of totalled EVs or pulled in major recalls can be repaired and reused. "Essentially, we do an initial check on the battery, plug into it and hook it up and get the overall diagnostics to see if it's suffering from about 10 or 15 different things," Skalovsky said. "We don't do any grading on the cellular level because it's just too small, you know. If a module is bad, it's bad."

Modules that pass can be remanufactured, similar to how complex components like steering racks, pumps, and transmissions are often pulled and reused today. In the future, for OEMs handling EV warranty repairs, this could be invaluable.

"If you show up with, like, a three- or four-year-old EV, the last thing that an OEM wants to do is have to put a new pack in the vehicle, right?" Redwood's Switzer said. "They want to put a like-for-like pack back in. People talk all the time about end of life batteries and using them for stationary storage, but our view is: The best application for an EV pack is back in an EV."

Switzer estimates that remanufacturing an EV pack uses just 30 percent of the overall effort required to completely tear that same pack down to raw materials and build it up again. That should mean a comparable cost savings, as well.

Standardizing Battery Construction

A major way to boost module reuse would be with greater standardization. Although there is some going on in the industry, by and large each manufacturer relies on its own pack structure and, often, custom chemistry within individual cells. But according to Cox Automotive's Skalovsky, that may be changing.

He likens today's batteries to complex components that, over the years, have evolved to largely standardized designs. Things like transmissions: "When you see a transmission, it looks the same as any other transmission," he said. "I think in probably eight to 10 years battery pack manufacturing will be kind of perfected to a point where we're finding a uniform design and form, fit, and chemistry."

This, Skalovsky said, would not only increase the efficiency of reuse and recycling, but manufacturing, too: "If we had a uniform chemistry, we could just run the same batteries all day every day. And, from a serviceability standpoint, you could probably service them closer at the dealer level."

However, at Redwood, Switzer says standardization isn't a focus right now: "Our overall goal is to get as many electrified vehicles out there as we can, and I think the manufacturer's focus is, and probably should be, on performance, range, you know, delivering a vehicle that the customer wants. It's very hard to design for recycling right now, especially to try and align yourself with other manufacturers."

Process Optimization With AI and Machine Learning

Given the variety of batteries that come in for recycling to a place like Redwood, everything from full EV packs down to the little button cells that power tire pressure monitors, just sorting and pulling them apart is an incredibly manual process. Thankfully, that's changing.

"We receive production scrap from companies like Panasonic, that's their scrap cells that, you know, don't make it into final production," Redwood's Switzer said. "We have robots that unload the trays, stack the trays, and then send the cells directly in for recycling. So, there's actually no real human interaction there."

When it comes to random batteries from random sources, though, identifying the types of cells is largely done manually. "That doesn't scale very well," Switzer said, "so we've actually invested pretty heavily, I would say, in sorting technologies using multiple sensing technologies."

Those sensory inputs help train Redwood's systems in a process called machine learning, a basic but fundamental building block to artificial intelligence, which will ultimately identify batteries by construction and chemistry. "It gets smarter the more batteries it sees, and we've seen, I would say, incredible success there."

Solid State and Future Chemistries

If you've been reading our other coverage on EVs , you know that technologies like solid-state batteries stand poised to revolutionize the range and performance of electric cars—eventually. "These OEMs have bought everything they need to make batteries for the next 10 to 12 years," Cox Automotive's Skalovsky said. "I think the first that we would see [solid state], and this is just my opinion, is probably the mid-2030s."

When these packs do hit the market, they'll need to be recycled, as well. "You know, it's fundamentally different chemistry, but it's not not some transformational thing that just would not work in the process," Redwood's Switzer said. "We've actually worked with a couple of solid-state companies today." Switzer added that these startups are churning through a lot of raw material and generating a lot of scrap as they figure out this new technology.

"The benefit of us working with them now is it gives us practice," he said. "Essentially, it gives us early eyes on what that chemistry could look like. And from what we see, there's no concerns from our side."

Supply and Scale

The Inflation Reduction Act has resulted in strong incentives for domestic battery production. That, in turn, has spawned massive investment across the industry. Redwood itself plans to spend $3.5 billion building a new battery recycling and component manufacturing plant in Charleston, South Carolina.

More production will mean more need for raw materials.

"[Recycling] is probably the most logical thing to go after in terms of resources. It doesn't obviously require decades of permitting, you know. It's a much quicker process to stand up a recycling facility than it is to stand up a new mine for a new material, not to mention that we have all the elements we need in one spot versus a typical mine," Switzer said.

For higher-volume materials, like nickel, Switzer hopes recycling could eventually meet up to 30 percent of the demand. The domestic cobalt supply, though, could be significantly higher. Cobalt is actually used sparingly in modern batteries compared to older ones, many of which are now coming in for recycling. "We're taking in material with much higher cobalt than we need to output, so we can thrift that over a larger number of electric vehicles," he said.

Cox Automotive's Skalovsky believes that even the gap on other materials can be closed, similar to what has been done in the past. "Seventy years ago, for lead acid batteries, we had to import that lead to get that stuff going," he said. "At some point, the recycling stood up enough where we could just funnel that into a circular economy. And [now] we don't need to go and mine a bunch of lead. I look at it the same way with nickel and cobalt. The quicker we get to that point, the easier it is to make batteries."

And the easier it is to make batteries, the cheaper and more environmentally friendly they'll be.